SPITE

This is the first popular book on a phenomon that extends from trivial behaviour in a supermarket to global poltics: spite. What is it about humans, uniquely, that leads to self-harm in order to damage an antagonist even more?

McCarthy-Jones has pulled together decades of research, eye-popping examples and provocative ideas from psychology, economics, genetics, literature and current affairs to examine why humans inflict self-harm just to get one over on someone else. Why would we secretly want our friends to fail?

It's important to note that there's a hopeful message here too - the upside of our dark side! Spite can drive us forward, and Simon provides a fresh perspective on the word by showing the evolutionary benefits of spite as a social leveller, an enabler of defiance, a wellspring of freedom and a vital weapon in our everyday armoury. Spite helps to explain how human societies flourish.

Simon McCarthy-Jones is an academic psychologist (he is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) and an excellent communicator. He has previously worked at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) and Durham University (Durham, UK).

The stories in SPITE are irresistible, and provide a real insight into human nature. Spicing all of this up are the games that Simon has assembled to find out which of us is spiteful, and at what level: such as the Ultimatum Game, or more terrifyingly the Joy of Destruction Game.