The Power of Human: How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World

by Adam Waytz

Overview

An urgent yet hopeful analysis of the surge in dehumanization, and how we can reverse it.

The unprecedented access to other humans that technology provides has ironically freed us from engaging with them. Thanks to social media, we can know a campaigning politician’s platform; an avid traveler’s restaurant recommendations; and the daily emotional fluctuations of our friends without ever even picking up the phone. According to social psychologist Adam Waytz, our increasingly human-free lives come with a serious cost that we’ve already begun to pay: the loss of our humanity.

Humans have superpowers. More than any other psychological stimulus, our presence can make experiences feel significant, inspire moral behavior, and encourage action. Recent studies suggest that we even have power over mortality—the survival rate of individuals with stronger social relationships has been found to be twice as high as those with weak relationships.

The Power of Human shows us how to rehumanize and harness these unique abilities to improve our lives, beginning with our jobs. The remedy for the dehumanized worker is twofold. Employers, Waytz argues, must instill humanity into work by capitalizing on distinctly human skills, especially sociability and variability. Meanwhile, workers need to put to rest the idea that you are what you do and instead detach their personal identities from their occupations. Waytz offers a similarly science-based method to counter the rising threat that technology poses to our humanity, outlining how we can design human-machine partnerships that optimize the strengths of both parties. Finally, he reveals how, by humanizing intimacy and conflict in unexpected ways, we can strengthen relationships with both our friends and enemies. Essential reading for individuals and institutions alike, The Power of Human explains how we can solve one of our time’s biggest problems by better utilizing the influence we have on one another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393634761
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Adam Waytz is an award-winning social psychologist and associate professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His writing appears in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part 1

Chapter 1 The Dehumanizing Shift 3

Chapter 2 Humans as Meaning Makers 29

Chapter 3 The Morality of Humanity 44

Chapter 4 Human Influence as the Engine of Action 65

Chapter 5 Human-Centered Motivation 82

Part 2

Chapter 6 Humanizing Work in the Automation Age 99

Chapter 7 Building Human-Machine Partnerships 127

Chapter 8 Seeing Human amid Conflict 154

Chapter 9 Humanizing Close Relationships through Critical Distance 185

Epilogue Time, Connection, and Mattering 197

Acknowledgments 201

Notes 203

Index 239

Editorial Reviews

"In a moment when victims of the most pressing human problems are robbed of their humanity, a pioneering social scientist offers a road map for restoring dignity and compassion. This is an important, engaging exploration of how we can create a world where people feel seen and respected."

Adam Grant

"This is an enlightening book about human-ness, the inherent value it provides, and how we are losing it. More compellingly than I’ve ever seen, Waytz argues that it’s a poor choice when we allow present-day forces of separation to take the human from our relationships: the relation gets removed, leaving just the ships, passing at sea."

Robert B. Cialdini

"Adam Waytz is a leading thinker about the issues arising from the emerging era of pervasive human-machine interaction. Drawing from his social psychology foundation, The Power of Human offers important insight and practical suggestions to master this new definition of humanity."

Brad Keywell

"Rigorously researched and thoroughly provocative. A brilliant, timely reminder of how the power of humanity touches all aspects of our lives."

Jonah Berger

"What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to see others as fully human? To make others feel fully human? In this compelling book, Adam Waytz shows how the answer to these questions can help us reduce human conflict and improve lives."

Carol Dweck

2019-04-10
It's hard work being human—and putting up with other humans. However, writes social psychologist Waytz (Northwestern Univ.), it's necessary in the face of creeping dehumanism.

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, calls have come for increased attention to civility and empathy toward those who didn't vote the way we did. The enmity, writes the author, comes from not "seeing human," not admitting the humanity of the other—and never mind, as the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observed, that "the responsibility to forge unity belongs not to the denigrated but to the denigrators." Waytz enumerates the many ways in which we regularly dehumanize the other, as drone pilots call the children they've bombed "fun-sized terrorists," pornography turns sexuality into something clinical, and the like. He observes, for instance, that between 1970 and the present, the number of people who responded positively in a poll to the proposition that humans can be trusted has declined precipitously—a decline that he links, but not as closely as one might wish, to income inequality. Reversing trends of polarization and stratification will be important in maintaining any semblance of a civil society, he writes. Observing that people "behave more morally toward individuals than groups," the author counsels applying the "power of human" of his title, working under the assumption that we are all more influential than we might think in modeling behavior—for, as he writes, "fitting in with others, by doing what they do, feels good." Still, Waytz allows that "empathy is cognitively demanding because getting inside of another mind draws on finite working memory, our capacity to hold and process information," which is already overtaxed. It is especially demanding on those whose work requires "emotional labor," such as first responders, teachers, and service personnel.

An interesting foray into the realm of emotional intelligence, with good questions raised if not always entirely answered.

Kirkus Reviews