Why do we buy? How do our acts of--and ideas about--consumption impact our selves, our institutions, and our societies? An incisive response to these questions, "Why I Buy" explains how consumption came to give meaning and value to social and personal life. Balancing psychological, conceptual, and historical analyses with examples drawn from popular culture and mass media, Rami Gabriel traces the ways in which beliefs about the self--including dualism, individualism, and expressivism--influence consumer behavior. These understandings of the self, Gabriel argues, structure the values that Americans seek and find in consumer society; they therefore have structural consequences for our cultural, political, and economic lives. For example, Gabriel describes how imbalances in the institutions of participatory politics have directly resulted from a consumer society centered on powerful nongovernmental institutions and a scattered body of disengaged citizens whose social and individual needs are not primarily satisfied through civic involvement. By exploring the relationship between our individual needs and our institutions, Gabriel ultimately points the way toward transformations that could lead to a more sustaining and sustainable society.

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain's computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human-art, mythology, religion-can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species' cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique.

From self-help to medication, therapy, and cognitive neuroscience, this book traces the uses and limits of psychology. Offering a systematic exploration of the ways in which psychology is used in contemporary society, it refines our understanding of the extent of the field. In addition to conceptual analysis of how science, truth, biology, mind, and meaning intersect and interact in the mind sciences, A Suspicious Science draws from history and anthropology to articulate an interdisciplinary multi-level form of psychology that may serve to orient the field. The book synthesizes debates in psychology and philosophy concerning methodology and the nature of explanation with debates about its practical context as a human science. Ultimately, it suggests psychology provides us myths and rituals that ground a particular sense of meaning and motivation in our lives. By aligning cultural, emotional, and philosophical uses of psychology, this book clarifies a synoptic, humanistic model of the mind within the human sciences.