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Have men really been engaged in a centuries-old conspiracy to exploit and oppress women? Have the essential differences between men and women really been erased? Have men now become unnecessary? Are they good for anything at all? In Is There Anything Good About Men?, Roy Baumeister offers provocative answers to these and many other questions about the current state of manhood in America. Baumeister argues that relations between men and women are now and have always been more cooperative than antagonistic, that men and women are different in basic ways, and that successful cultures capitalize o

Literaturangaben

This book provides a coherent explanation of human nature, which is to say how people think, act, and feel, what they want, and how they interact with each other. The central idea is that the human psyche was designed by evolution to enable people to create and sustain culture

The human agent exists in a world consisting not only of facts and stimuli but also of possibilities. The multiplicity of possibilities is most readily apparent in the future. Pragmatic prospection theory proposes that people think about the future to predict possibilities (e.g. choice points requiring decision) rather than final outcomes. This process can be analyzed into two heuristic steps. The first one envisions a desirable outcome and therefore is optimistically biased. The second step considers how to reach that outcome, including noting obstacles and difficulties, and is therefore less subject to optimistic bias. Many psychological processes are adapted for an environment in which uncertainty is a frequent aspect, and the psychology of dealing with uncertainty mixes simple, crude responses (e.g. conserve resources, be alert to all information) with complex and sometimes irrational ones. The advanced human form of agency, sometimes called free will, involves complex processes including mental simulation of future alternatives, integration across time, and application of meaningful categories and principles to the causation of behavior.