Just got this email from David Berreby, Park Sloper and author of the book, Us and Them: The Science of Identity, which is just out in  paperback from the University of Chicago Press this week. The subtitle of the book has changed. It used to be: Understanding Your Tribal Mind.

On the website Blogging Heads, there’s a dialog (or, ahem, diavlog) posting this Saturday, Oct 18, in which John Horgan and I discuss Us and Them aspects of the 2008 election, whether progress exists,how much people understand why they do stuff, and other cheery topics.

It’s keyed to the paperback edition of my book, US AND THEM, which was
published this week by the University of Chicago Press.

Be grateful to know what you think, if you care to check it out.

Here’s the blurbage from Amazon about Us and Them: 

Democrat and Republican. Meat Eaters and Vegetarians. Black and White.
As human beings we sort ourselves into groups. And once we identify
ourselves as a member of a particular group—say, Red Sox fans—we tend
to feel more comfortable with others of our own kind, rather than, say,
Yankees fans. Yet we all belong to multiple groups at the same time—one
might be a woman, a mother, an American, a violinist. How do we decide
which identities matter and why they matter so much? And what makes us
willing to die for, or to kill for, a religion, a nation, or a race?

In this award-winning book, David Berreby describes how
twenty-first-century science is addressing these age-old questions.
Ably linking neuroscience, social psychology, anthropology, and other
fields, Us and Them investigates humanity’s “tribal mind” and
how this alters our thoughts, affects our health, and is manipulated
for good and ill. From the medical effects of stress to the rhetoric of
politics, our perceptions of group identity affect every part of our
lives. Science, Berreby argues, shows how this part of human nature is
both unexpectedly important and surprisingly misunderstood.
            —Henry Gee, Scientific American