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Be forewarned: Mark Buchanan's book will surprise, irritate, and confound you. Like Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, The Social Atom proposes that even serious readers aren't models of autonomous, rational decision making. Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, argues that even momentous life crossroads like deciding to have children or making job changes are products of social forces almost identical to those that control our clapping at a music concert. He notes that for 99 percent of human history, our ancestors lived in small-group environments in which reciprocal altruism was the norm. According to Buchanan, who edits a journal on biocomplexity, this deeply engrained heritage gives us both a bias for cooperation and a distrust of other groups.

From the Publisher

The idiosyncrasies of human decision-making have confounded economists and social theorists for years. If each person makes choices for personal (and often irrational) reasons, how can people’s choices be predicted by a single theory? How can any economic, social, or political theory be valid? The truth is, none of them really are.

Mark Buchanan makes the fascinating argument that the science of physics is beginning to provide a new picture of the human or “social atom,” and help us understand the surprising, and often predictable, patterns that emerge when they get together. Look at patterns, not people, Buchanan argues, and rules emerge that can explain how movements form, how interest groups operate, and even why ethnic hatred persists. Using similar observations, social physicists can predict whether neighborhoods will integrate, whether stock markets will crash, and whether crime waves will continue or abate.

Brimming with mind games and provocative experiments, The Social Atom is an incisive, accessible, and comprehensive argument for a whole new way to look at human social behavior.

Publishers Weekly

Buchanan (Ubiquity: The Science of History) reaches out to the audience for pop social science like The Tipping Pointand Freakonomicswith the concept of "social physics," a scientific model for the patterns that emerge from the interactions among large groups of people. Though his observations that people excel at imitating the successful behavior of others and will often form collective bonds over such fundamental pretenses as shared ethnic heritage aren't startling, Buchanan leans on his background in theoretical physics and treats these ideas as "a quantum revolution in the social sciences." His presentation is muted by a tendency to talk around the subject, recapping prior discussions and promising future developments instead of establishing a clear, compelling thread. Though the real-life scenarios he uses to illustrate his theories—such as the unexpected revival of Times Square or the outbreak of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia—are engaging, some sections draw upon computer simulations of arbitrary behavior that illustrate his thesis but don't command equal interest. This is a great idea for a magazine article, but awkward at book length. (June)

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Product Details

• ISBN: 1596910135
  
• ISBN-13: 9781596910133
• Format: Hardcover, 256pp
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Pub. Date: May 2007
• Sales Rank: 119,629