CANR
WORK TITLE: The Social Leap
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Brisbane
STATE:
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
Phone: +61 7 336 56430, +61 7 336 56230
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; University of Michigan, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Ohio State University, Columbus, instructor; University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia, professor, former head of School of Psychology.
MEMBER:Association for Psychological Science (fellow), Society of Experimental Social Psychology (fellow), Institute for Advanced Study (fellow).
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including New Ideas in Psychology and Leadership Quarterly. Contributor of chapters to books.
SIDELIGHTS
William von Hippel is a writer and educator. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Von Hippel served as an instructor at Ohio State University before joining the University of Queensland, in Australia. He has worked as a professor at that college and has served as the head of its School of Psychology. Von Hippel has written articles that have appeared in scholarly publications, including New Ideas in Psychology and Leadership Quarterly. He has also contributed chapters to books.
In 2018, von Hippel released The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy. In this volume, he discusses an evolutionary event and its effects on human happiness and social interactions. Von Hippel notes that early ancestors of humans lived in trees. A rainforest covered Africa at the time, making this type of living situation favorable for that species. However, over time, the continent’s climate changed, and its rainforests dried out. Replacing them were vast and open savannas. Humans’ ancestors were forced to stop living in trees and begin living on the ground. At this point, the ancestors evolved to gain the ability to walk upright. Additionally, they began interacting with one another much more than before. They started to develop social skills that helped them to protect one another from predators and live communally. Von Hippel argues that the transition from the trees to the ground was monumental in terms of human evolution. He calls that event the social leap. After the social leap, the human ancestors also learned how to build fires, which led to the advent of cooked food. Von Hippel explains that sharing a good meal, interacting with loved ones, and working together on a common goal are activities one can take part in now that will connect to a type of happiness whose origins are ancient.
The Social Leap received mixed assessments from critics. A Kirkus Reviews writer suggested: “The evolutionary science stuff seems a little undercooked at times.” However, the writer described the volume as “an engaging book.” The same writer concluded: “Full of insight into human character, von Hippel’s book provides a stimulating program for measuring success without material yardsticks.” A reviewer on the online version of Publishers Weekly called the book “an accessible, enjoyable, but less than revelatory primer.” Referring to von Hippel, the same reviewer commented: “He largely covers topics well explored elsewhere without providing new insights.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2018, review of The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy.
ONLINE
Inference-Review, http://inference-review.com/ (October 17, 2018), author profile.
Psychology Today Online, https://www.psychologytoday.com/ (October 17, 2018), author profile.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (October 17, 2018), review of The Social Leap.
University of Queensland, School of Psychology website, https://psychology.uq.edu.au/ (October 17, 2018), author faculty profile.
William von Hippel grew up in Alaska, got his B.A. at Yale and his PhD at the University of Michigan, and then taught for a dozen years at Ohio State University before finding his way to Australia, where he is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He has published more than a hundred articles, chapters, and edited books, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Economist, the BBC, Le Monde, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, and The Australian. He lives with his wife and two children in Brisbane, Australia.
William von Hippel, Ph.D., grew up in Alaska, got his B.A. at Yale and his PhD at the University of Michigan, and then taught for a dozen years at Ohio State University before finding his way to Australia, where he is a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland. He has published more than a hundred articles, chapters, and edited books in social psychology, and his research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Economist, the BBC, Le Monde, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, and The Australian. This blog is based on themes from Bill’s upcoming book, The Social Leap (to be published by HarperCollins in November 2018).
William von Hippel is professor and former head of the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. He conducts research in evolutionary social cognition and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He has published over a hundred articles, chapters, and edited books.
Professor Bill von Hippel
Professor
School of Psychology
Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences
billvh@psy.uq.edu.au
+61 7 336 56430
+61 7 336 56230
Overview
Publications
Grants
Supervision
Overview
Qualifications
Fellow, Association for Psychological Science
Doctor of Philosophy, University of Michigan
Bachelor of Arts, Yale University
Publications
Journal Article: Did humans evolve to innovate with a social rather than technical orientation?
von Hippel, William and Suddendorf, Thomas (2018) Did humans evolve to innovate with a social rather than technical orientation?. New Ideas in Psychology, 51 34-39. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2018.06.002
Journal Article: Inequality rules: resource distribution and the evolution of dominance- and prestige-based leadership
Ronay, Richard, Maddux, William W. and von Hippel, William (2018) Inequality rules: resource distribution and the evolution of dominance- and prestige-based leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, . doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.04.004
Journal Article: Attitudes of people working in mental health non-governmental organisations in Australia: a comparison with other mental health professionals
Rose, Grenville, von Hippel, Courtney, Brener, Loren and von Hippel, Bill (2018) Attitudes of people working in mental health non-governmental organisations in Australia: a comparison with other mental health professionals. Health Psychology Open, 5 1: 2055102918765413. doi:10.1177/2055102918765413
View all Publications
Grants
Overconfidence as an interpersonal strategy in negotiation and competition
(2016–2019) ARC Discovery Projects
A brain physiology laboratory for neuropsychological research in the new Queensland Neuropsychology Research Centre
(2016) UQ Major Equipment and Infrastructure
Positive Psychology Project
(2013–2016) Anglican Church Grammar School
View all Grants
Supervision
An Interpersonal Approach to the Causes and Consequences of Motivated Reasoning
(2018) Doctor Philosophy
Overconfidence in competition
Doctor Philosophy
An investigation of the adaptive functions of overconfidence
(2016) Doctor Philosophy
View all Supervision
QUOTED: "The evolutionary science stuff seems a little undercooked at times."
"an engaging book."
"Full of insight into human character, von Hippel's book provides a stimulating program for measuring success without material yardsticks."
von Hippel, William: THE SOCIAL LEAP
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
von Hippel, William THE SOCIAL LEAP Harper Wave/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 11, 13 ISBN: 978-0-06-274039-7
Forget gold toilets and private jets. The key to happiness may just lie in a cheeseburger--or a sandbox.
Want to be happy? Hang out with your friends. Do something good for the people around you. Learn something new. By von Hippel's (Psychology/Univ. of Queensland) account, such things all speak to the evolutionary leap our kind made when the African rainforest gave way to savanna and required us to descend from the trees and make our mark on the world upright. Genes "sculpt our minds," notes the author, but they are not strictly deterministic; in the nature/nurture argument, the answer is yes. A combined nature/nurture part of that leap, he adds, were the complex social skills that we developed in order to live successfully in the shadow of the big predators that we've since been busy eradicating. We learned other skills, as well, including the control of fire in order to cook food, which eventually saw a transformation "from our large-jawed, small-brained ancestors to our small-jawed, large-brained selves." One of the consequences of thinking more was to measure ourselves against others, leading to relativistic notions of success and well-being. "It doesn't really matter how smart and attractive I am," writes the author about various criteria in the mating game, "so long as I'm smarter and more attractive than the other available men." Self-confidence helps, too. The evolutionary science stuff seems a little undercooked at times, but the uses von Hippel makes of its resultant human nature yield an engaging book. In that regard, and in the pursuit of happiness, the author urges a program of engagement with community and others that reinforces social bonds, noting that "food, friends, and sexual relationships" are the three sine qua non of quotidian happiness; money isn't a detriment, but neither is it the be-all and end-all that so many self-help gurus hold it to be.
Full of insight into human character, von Hippel's book provides a stimulating program for measuring success without material yardsticks.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"von Hippel, William: THE SOCIAL LEAP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553948960/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9a555809. Accessed 5 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A553948960
QUOTED: "an accessible, enjoyable, but less than revelatory primer."
"He largely covers topics well explored elsewhere without providing new insights."
Von Hippel, a University of Queensland psychology professor, explains the basics of evolutionary psychology over the course of an accessible, enjoyable, but less than revelatory primer. The titular social leap occurred when early humans moved from the rainforest to the savannah, largely due to climate change, and faced severe evolutionary pressure to find new survival methods in an unfamiliar habitat. The solution, von Hippel explains, centered on the species becoming more intelligent and more social, as “cooperation and division of labor expanded our capabilities, transitioning us from prey to top predator.” He struggles between ensuring readers understand that genes are not all powerful (“evolutionary psychology is a story about how evolution shaped our genes, which in turn sculpt our minds, but it is not a genetically deterministic story at all”) and driving home just how much control they can exert (“Young men feel millions of years of evolutionary pressure, emanating from their testicles, pushing them toward risk and competition”). Although he does a credible job of discussing many of the field’s standards—the nature of sexual selection, possible origins of theory of mind—he largely covers topics well explored elsewhere without providing new insights. Agent: Lauren Sharp, Aevitas Creative. (Nov.)