I’m delighted to say that my new book ‘Humanise: how knowing ourselves could change the world‘ is, at last, published today!

Humanise is a popular psychology book that reveals the latest understanding about how human beings think and behave, and shows how we could use this knowledge to tackle some of our biggest challenges (including obesity, the post-truth world, prejudice, violence and climate change), and build a better future for people and our planet.

It argues that the modern world we’ve built is actually hostile to human beings in many ways, given the creatures we really are. We need to build ‘scaffolding’ around us to provide the conditions that will enable us to flourish and have a sustainable future. These conditions include protecting rather than exploiting our mental vulnerabilities and promoting our ‘superpower’ of cooperation rather than activating our negative tribal instincts. Its suggestions for scaffolding include banning advertising, giving everyone greater access to basic resources, and re-thinking how we use information so that it benefits people.

It’s been said that we’re living in a new era – the Anthropocene – one in which human activity has a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. The future in this era looks bleak. But Humanise suggests we have an opportunity to create a different, more hopeful era, in which we learn to regulate human behaviour by adjusting the scaffolding and structures around us to promote the traits of thinking and behaviour that serve us well in the modern world (like cooperation), and move away from those that don’t (such as negative tribalism), so that we can flourish and live within the parameters of the natural world we are part of.

As you can see from this summary, Humanise is a book of big ideas challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about ourselves, and the ideas, institutions and societies that surround us.

If you’d like to read a summary of the book, click here. I also give a talk on the main arguments of the book in a special new episode of my podcast ‘Humans & Hope’ – click here to listen to it.

The book is available to buy here – and from most other good booksellers if Amazon isn’t your thing.