The village effect - Susan Pinker

Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience together with gripping human stories, award-winning author and psychologist Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Her results are enlightening and enlivening, and they challenge our assumptions.
Most of us have left the literal village behind, and don't want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face-time with our friends and families in order to thrive - even to survive. Creating our own 'village effect' can make us happier. It can also save our lives.

Susan Pinker is a developmental psychologist, journalist, and author whose first book, The Sexual Paradox, won the American Psychological Association's most prestigious literary prize, the William James Book Award, and was published in seventeen countries. A national columnist, lecturer, and broadcaster whose work has garnered many writing awards, Pinker's ideas have been featured in The Times, the Guardian, The Economist, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Der Spiegel, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other publications. She lives in Montreal.

An urgent polemic directed at the virtualisation of our lives... Pinker brings a weight of learning and good sense to the case and, no matter how mild-mannered, she swings a wrecking ball through the virtualists' house of cards
Sunday Times - Bryan Appleyard

A terrific book . . . Pinker makes a hardheaded case for a softhearted virtue. Read this book. Then talk about it - in person! - with a friend.
Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human

Susan Pinker's delightful book shows why face-to-face interaction at home, school, and work makes us healthier, smarter, and more successful.
Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit

The benefits of the digital age have been oversold. Or to put it another way: there is plenty of life left in face-to-face, human interaction. That is the message emerging from this entertaining book by Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist. Citing a wealth of research and reinforced with her own arguments, Pinker suggests we should make an effort - at work and in our private lives - to promote greater levels of personal intimacy.
Financial Times

Drawing on scores of psychological and sociological studies, Pinker suggests that living as our ancestors did, steeped in face-to-face contact and physical proximity, is the key to health, while loneliness is less an exalted existential state than a public health risk.
Boston Globe