Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success

Jessica Tracy

Sep 2016 · Brilliance Audio · Narrated by Coleen Marlo

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7 hr 33 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

A leading psychologist reveals how our most misunderstood emotion—pride—has shaped our minds and our culture, and shows how we can harness its power.

Why did Paul Gauguin abandon middle-class life to follow the path of a starving artist? What inspired Bill Gates to give away so much of his hard-won fortune? How has Donald Trump succeeded so excessively, when his winning style could easily be his greatest liability?

As the renowned emotion researcher Jessica Tracy reveals in Take Pride, each of these superachievers has been motivated by an often maligned emotion: pride. Its dark, hubristic side is well known, but Tracy shows that pride is also essential for helping us become our best, brightest selves. By making us care about how others see us and how we see ourselves, pride makes us strive for excellence. In the right doses and the right contexts, it has been proven to boost creativity, motivate altruism, and confer status and power on those who display it. In Take Pride, Tracy explains why we came to feel pride and how we can make this double-edged emotion serve us—rather than the other way around.

A leading psychologist reveals how our most misunderstood emotion—pride—has shaped our minds and our culture, and shows how we can harness its power. Why did Paul Gauguin abandon middle-class life to follow the path of a starving artist? What inspired Bill Gates to give away so much of his hard-w...

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About the author

Jessica Tracy is associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she also directs the Emotion & Self Lab. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 2005. Her research focuses on emotions and emotion expressions, and, in particular, those emotions that are most intricately intertwined with our sense of self: pride, shame, and guilt. She has coedited two academic volumes, The Self-Conscious Emotions and The Psychology of Social Status, and has published over eighty journal articles, book chapters, and theoretical reviews in psychology and interdisciplinary science journals. Winner of the James McKeen Cattell Dissertation Award from the New York Academy of Sciences and of the International Society for Self and Identity Early Career Award, she has had her research findings covered by hundreds of media outlets, including ABC's Good Morning America, NPR's All Things Considered, the New York Times, The Economist, and Scientific American. Tracy was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Vancouver with her daughter, her partner, and their small dog.

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