Social Psychology and Human Nature, Brief Version (4th Edition) – PDF

About The Author

Brad J. Bushman

Dr. Brad J. Bushman is the Chair of Mass Communication Professor at Ohio State University. He has published extensively on the consequences and causes of human aggression. His work has questioned the utility of catharsis and relates also to violent video game effects on aggression. Along with Roy Baumeister, his work suggests that it is narcissism, not low self-esteem, that causes people to act more aggressively after an insult. His research has been featured in Newsweek, on 20/20, on the CBS Evening News, and on National Public Radio.

He has also been featured on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!. He got his BS in psychology from Weber State University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1989 and holds 3 master's degrees (in statistics, psychology, and secondary education). Since 2005, Bushman has spent the summers as a professor of communication science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Prior to joining Ohio State University, Bushman was a professor at Iowa State University and the University of Michigan.

He was awarded an Ig Nobel award in psychology in 2013 for his work about the attractiveness of drunk people. In 2014 he got the Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Media Psychology and Technology award from the American Psychological Association.

Roy F. Baumeister

Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia, has taught introductory social psychology to thousands of graduate and undergraduate students. He got his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1978. His research and teaching experience includes appointments at the Florida State University, University of California at Berkeley, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Virginia, the Max Planck Institute in Munich (Germany), the University of Texas at Austin, the VU University, Amsterdam (the Netherlands), the University of Bamberg (Germany), the University of Melbourne (Australia), King Abdulaziz University (Saudi Arabia), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. An active researcher whose work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Templeton Foundation, Roy has conducted research on the self (including self-control and self-esteem), the need to belong, aggression, sexuality, and how people find meaning in life.

According to Google Scholar, Dr. Roy Baumeister's works have been cited over 175,000 times in scientific literature. In 2013, he received the William James Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Association for Psychological Science in all of psychology. In his spare time, he likes to play jazz and ski.