How to Rethink Human Behavior: A Practical Guide to Social Contextual Analysis

Developed from the author’s long teaching career, How to Rethink Human Behavior aims to cultivate practical skills in human observation and analysis, rather than offer a catalogue of immutable ‘facts’. It synthesizes key psychological concepts with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, economics, and history.

The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order to make better sense of why people do what they do, say what they say, and think what they think. These methods can also be applied to our own thoughts, talk and actions - not as something we control from ‘within’ but as events constantly being shaped by the idiosyncratic social, cultural, economic and other contexts in which our lives are immersed.

Whether teaching, studying, or reading for pleasure, this book will help readers learn:

• How to think about people with ecological or contextual thinking
• How your thinking is a conversation with other people
• How to analyze talk and conversations as social strategies
• How capitalist economies change how you act, talk and think in 25 ways
• How living in modern society can be linked to generalized anxiety and depression

How to Rethink Human Behavior is important interdisciplinary reading for students and researchers in all fields of social science, and will especially appeal to those interested in mental health. It has also been written for the general reading public who enjoy exploring new ideas and skills in understanding themselves and other people.

Bernard Guerin is Professor of Psychology at the University of South Australia.