I’m very excited to announce that my fourth book ‘Humanise: How knowing ourselves could change the world’ will be out on Friday 25th October 2024.

A summary of the book is here, but the core aim of the book has been to provide an accessible yet reasonably accurate picture of how human beings think and behave, and then apply this to some of our most pressing challenges as creatures. It is based on the idea that there is little chance of us building a better society or addressing our challenges as a species if we don’t understand ourselves as creatures first.

Yet, as the book reveals, this is exactly what we have been trying to do over recent decades. Most people – including policy makers and politicians – have an inaccurate or incomplete conception of how human beings think and behave, based on out-of-date thinking from the Enlightenment, and this has hampered our ability to tackle major human challenges including the obesity crisis, disinformation, prejudice, violence and climate change.

The third part of the book seeks to bring all these themes together and ask why we seem to be struggling as creatures with aspects of the modern world, including the challenges mentioned above. It argues that the modern world we have built around us actually represents a hostile environment for human beings in a number of ways, and argues that the only way to build a world in which humans can flourish is to ‘humanise’ the ideas, institutions and structures that surround us. These radical changes will help support rather than exploit some of our cognitive and behavioural vulnerabilities – from our inbuilt thinking biases to our tendency for tribalism – and help nurture some of our traits that will be more useful in our interdependent modern world, including our ‘superpower’ of co-operation.

It is a hopeful but radical book that will challenge people’s views of what they are, as well as some of our most basic ideas, institutions and assumptions – from freedom to education. I feel it provides some basic foundations that could give us the most realistic chance of building a better and more sustainable future for our species and the planet.

The book has been a huge undertaking as it is essentially 3 books in one, with each requiring a strong review of the evidence base. The first part is a psychology book, the second an analysis of 5 key human challenges and the third part a discussion of political, social and practical possibilities for the world we could build ourselves in the future. Overall, I hope it is a book that will be both interesting and stimulate future research and action on how to build a better future based on understanding the creatures we really are.

Click here to pre-order it!

Talks

I’m doing an online talk to promote the book on the 28th October 2024. It would be lovely to see you there. The link to book (free) tickets is below:

• 28th October 8pm BST – click here for tickets