Making Sense of People The Science of Personality Differences

A NEW, MORE PRACTICAL EDITION OF THE POPULAR SCIENTIFIC GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING OTHER PEOPLE

What really bothers you about your boss—or your daughter’s boyfriend? Why are you so attracted to the person you’re dating? Can you rely on your intuition about people? This book will help you find out.

Drawing on extensive research, renowned psychiatrist and neuroscientist Samuel Barondes gives you powerful tools for understanding what people are really like and how they got that way.

Now improved with easy, step-by-step “practical summaries,” these tools will help you quickly assess anyone’s tendencies, patterns, character, and sense of identity. You’ll learn how to combine these into a unified picture of who that person is. With these insights, you can choose more satisfying relationships, recognize telltale signs of dysfunction and danger, and savor the complexity and uniqueness of everyone you meet.

A quick, easy system for understanding anyone!

• Supplement your intuition
• Identify character strengths and weaknesses
• Make better decisions about whom to seek out and whom to avoid
• Find out how all personalities are shaped by two great chance events: the set of genes we happen to be born with, and the world we happen to grow up in

SAMUEL H. BARONDES (Sausalito, CA), a leading neuroscientist, is Director Emeritus of the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, and Chairman Emeritus of the Psychiatry Department at UCSF. His previous trade books include Mood Genes; Better than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs; and the Scientific American Library title Drugs and the Brain. He has made major contributions to the basic cell and molecular biology of neuronal recognition.

Introduction: When Intuition Isn't Enough

I. Describing Some Differences

1. Words About People

2. Troublesome Patterns

II. Explaining Some Differences

3. How Genes Make Us Different

4. Building A Personal Brain

III. Whole Persons, Whole Lives

5. What's A Good Character?

6. What's Their Story?

7. How Understanding Helps

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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