Science Research

In The Advertising Effect, respected advertising insider, Adam Ferrier, reveals the ten techniques used by some of the best-known brands across the globe. These techniques are grounded in psychological theory with award winning real world examples and explore how the most effective way to change behaviour is through action rather than the conventional advertising practices (emotional or rational persuasion).

First, we were told we all needed to have HRT to remain interesting for our husbands. Then, we were told it was going to give us cancer and put us in an early grave. Next, we were told HRT was safe and we had to take it, or we'd all end up with crippling brain fog, quitting our jobs and...

In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps 500 body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit men to gun down 41 police officers and prison guards in two days. In Southern Mexico a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans.

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream.

"As a sex writer, Jesse Bering is fearless—and peerless." —Dan Savage "You are a sexual deviant. A pervert, through and through." We may not want to admit it, but as the award-winning columnist and psychologist Jesse Bering reveals in Perv, there is a spectrum of perversion along which we...

Ever notice that all watch ads show 10:10 as the time? Or that all fast-food restaurants use red or yellow in their logos? Or that certain stores are always having a sale? You may not be aware of these details, yet they’ve been influencing you all along. Every time you purchase, swipe, or click, marketers are able to more accurately predict your behavior. These days, brands know more about you than you know about yourself. Blindsight is here to change that.

For centuries, economics was dominated by the idea that we are rational individuals who optimize our own “utility”. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists demonstrated that the reality is a lot messier. We don’t really know what our utility is, and we care about people other than ourselves. We are susceptible to external nudges. And far from being perfectly rational, we are prone to “cognitive biases” with complex effects on decision-making, such as forgetting to prepare for retirement.

Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is an audiobook full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of rereading Pride and Prejudice.

Does the number of children gunned down double each year? Does anorexia kill 150,000 young women annually? Do white males account for only a sixth of new workers? Startling statistics shape our thinking about social issues. But all too often, these numbers are wrong. This book is a lively guide to spotting bad statistics and learning to think critically about these influential numbers. Damned Lies and Statistics is essential listening for everyone who reads or listens to the news....

Research is anchored by assumptions. How do we complete research—and why? This book—The Three Monkeys of Research—explores epistemology, ontology and methodology. Tara Brabazon explores how ideas become knowledge, and how arguments are verified, believed and disseminated to scholars, stakeholders and citizens.

Political Research Design and the Science of Politics offers listeners detailed information about the basic principles and nuances of developing empirical research design procedures to predict and describe political phenomena. In chronicling the predominant approaches used in empirical political research, the strengths and limitations of various research strategies are contrasted. Major controversies in contemporary political science are discussed.

Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe.

Life in Space explores the many aspects and outcomes of NASAs research in life sciences, a little-understood endeavor that has often been overlooked in histories of the space agency. Maura Mackowski details NASAs work in this field from spectacular promises made during the Reagan era to the major new directions set by George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration.

One of "12 Books to Start a Smart New Year" by The Wall Street Journal One of the "Top Book Bites of 2021" by New York Times bestselling authors Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Dan Pink's Next Big Idea Club Nominated for the Audie, Porchlight, Nautilus, and William James Book...

From the world’s foremost neuroscientist of romantic love comes a personal story of connection and heartbreak that brings new understanding to an old truth: better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. "This highly accessible audiobook is not only a love story, but also an...

Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, the 1890 book by Nellie Bly, chronicles her sensational 72-day trip around the world for the tabloid newspaper, New York World. On November 14, 1889, she boarded the steamer Augusta Victoria on her journey of 23,899 miles with the goal of finishing in 75 days. Her journey took her through England, France, Italy, the Suez Canal, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan to San Francisco where she boarded a private chartered train which brought her to New York on January 25, 1890, 72 days and six hours after leaving.

Social scientists have adopted the practices of more traditional scientists in the past few decades - using randomized trials to design policies aimed at improving educational levels, lowering crime rates, elevating employment rates, and improving living standards among the poor. Andrew Leigh and P.J. Ochlan bring the lives of these radical researchers to life as their experiments to overturn conventional wisdom lead to breakthroughs like finding the cure for scurvy and discovering what policies really improve literacy rates.

You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker.

Ancient cultures around the world spoke of a vast cycle of time with alternating dark and golden ages; Plato called it the Great Year. Most of us were taught in school that the dark ages were real but the golden age was just a universal myth. But new scientific evidence suggest this cycle of high and low ages may have some basis in fact. Now that the astronomical community has discovered that something massive is tugging on our solar system the stage is set for discovering the motion that moves us from high ages of enlightenment to low ages of darkness.

While grieving her husband's murder, a young Colorado veterinarian meets a troubled FBI agent and begins to uncover the world's most sinister secrets in this thriller from James Patterson. Frannie O'Neill is a young and talented veterinarian living in Colorado. Plagued by the mysterious murder...