Books like How Behavior Spreads — picked by fans

This is a pie-in-the-sky 30-year plan for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by joint worldwide implementation of 80 “solutions.” For each of these, the book proposes a number of giga-tons of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and the resulting dollar cost and savings.

I admire Hawken for his quantitative approach and his imaginative list of “solutions.” The numbers reveal the enormity of the drawdown enterprise. Some “solutions” are merely the usual renewables. Some came as a nice surprise to me, such as LED lanterns with batteries and small solar panels for residents in off-the-grid regions.

But I fear many of the solutions will never be rigorously implemented and would have a high policing cost to ensure compliance. For instance, the first solution involves the collection of refrigerant gases from expiring air conditioners. Who will voluntarily pay for this?

An important Network Climate Action is raising money for environmental and women’s health NGOs.

Although our fundraising efforts don’t all go viral, design principles derived from successful campaigns—such as the Ice Bucket Challenge—help us exploit the way power is leveraged over the internet.

In addition to connectivity or creating a feeling of community, “new power” campaigns encourage participants to customize ideas for their own context.

Arising in opposition to consumerist Black Friday and Cyber Monday, GivingTuesday is about donating money to nonprofits. Its heart-shaped logo is designed to be adapted for different causes, including climate. 

If we could just teach about the evils of climate change, people would surely change their behaviors.

I knew this idea was not born up by the facts and was searching for an alternative. This book showed me that if I wanted to get people to eat climate-friendly foods or become a climate advocate, I needed to think about social connections—in particular, what people see their friends and family doing.

Not only do the authors describe how we influence each other’s health, voting, and even happiness—they also argue that social networks provide a middle ground between individual destiny vs structural determinism.

In my work, Network Climate Action is similarly a middle ground between individual behavior change vs government policy in addressing the climate crisis. 

Destination weddings, glamorous McMansions, and luxury cars—this is the result of us seeing what our better-off compatriots do and wanting to have ever more.

In fact, the biggest problem with carbon-intensive behavior is not any one rich person’s carbon footprint. Rather it’s the influence “affluencers” exert on others. But we can turn this around. Solar panels are often clustered in neighborhoods because people also copy each other’s climate-friendly behaviors.

For me, the important thing is not to hide what you are doing—make your sustainable behaviors visible for others to see.

Moffett is a leading specialist on social insects, and the core of his penetrating insight is that we ought to clearly distinguish between collective behavior and social behavior. Our ability to see that one stranger belongs to our society, while another stranger does not, is utterly crucial, and Moffett speaks with authority when he claims that humans are the only animals where different societies merge over time. In particular, he correctly notes that time and time again there has been a fusion between human societies under the heel of a conquering force. By carefully considering our bee-like nature, as well as our chimp-like nature, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind has created sprawling civilizations of unrivalled complexity and provides some valuable insights into what it will take to sustain them.

I am attracted to books that take a broad theme and examine this across space and time –without being confined to a single academic discipline. Another requirement is that they are written in an elegant and accessible style that commands the reader’s attention. This book originally published in Germany in 1960 satisfies both criteria. It defies ready classification but includes social psychology, social anthropology, and ideas related to myth, ritual, and religion. His concept of ‘the pack’ builds on the abstract notion of ‘the crowd’ and leads to ideas such as ‘transformation.’ As the Brexit vote was a form of crowd behaviour, reading this book helped me understand more about it.

In this book we learn that our actions are shaped by that of others or by our expectation of what others will do.

If, for example, a white neighbor leaves the neighborhood upon seeing a minority family move in, other white neighbors are likely to follow suit if they expect more white neighbors to move out and more minorities to move in. If a critical mass of white neighbors adopts this behavior, the result is a segregated neighborhood.

Applied this idea to the study of mass atrocities, we understand mass participation in mass atrocities as not a result of moral failure, but a social phenomenon driven by imitating nature and belonging need of the humankind. This understanding humanizes the mass perpetrators of an atrocity and opens space for reconciliation.

I have liked all the Gamache books, but this one blew me away.

Not just another clever puzzle-solving entertainment (which it is). It’s also a compelling meditation on the ethics of free speech in our world today as we struggle with a pandemic and elect autocrats into seats of power.

And this isn’t just any free speech, but speech coolly advocating for euthanizing the elderly and disabled, because caring for them is too expensive, and a waste—they’ll die anyway and leave society with much-reduced ability to care for those with a real chance to survive.

This speaker is a reputable academic, popular, and with hard data to support her position. Which is why someone wants to kill her. Which is why Gamache is brought in.

I have told countless people about this book; it is one of the most life-changing books I’ve ever read. Bob Beaudine offers a dramatic idea: that each of us is given 15 “who”—people who can profoundly change the course of our lives.

Our “who” consists of 12 friends, 3 close friends, and one best friend who help us achieve our goals and dreams. Each of these people has a sphere of influence and can introduce us to them. Since reading this book, I have paid much closer attention to my “who” and how to stay actively involved with them.

Whenever I need to focus on what’s most important, I remind myself to prioritize the time I devote to interacting with my “who”.

While friends are important in many ways, so are “weak ties” within our networks. In this non-fiction book, sociologist Mario Luis Small analyzes interviews with a group of graduate students, investigating who they turn to for support about a range of topics, including love, depression, and finances. Because of the obligations that close friends and family entail, Small finds that people often avoid turning to these close ties and instead rely on the convenience of people in their orbits. I’m drawn to this book because it contradicts what we think we know about who we talk to about important matters and because it’s such a rich investigation of people’s social ties and under what circumstances they actually turn to the people closest to them.