Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World

by Tina Rosenberg

Overview

In the style of The Tipping Point or Freakonomics, a groundbreaking book that will change the way you look at the world.
The fearless Tina Rosenberg has spent her career tackling some of the world's hardest problems. The Haunted Land, her searing work on how Eastern Europe faced the crimes of Communism, garnered both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In Join the Club, she identifies a brewing social revolution that is changing the way people live, based on harnessing the positive force of peer pressure. Her stories of peer power in action show how it has reduced teen smoking in the United States, made villages in India healthier and more prosperous, helped minority students get top grades in college calculus, and even led to the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. She tells how creative social entrepreneurs are starting to use peer pressure to accomplish goals as personal as losing weight and as global as fighting terrorism. Inspiring and engrossing, Join the Club explains how we can better our world through humanity's most powerful and abundant resource: our connections with one another.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393341836
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/23/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Tina Rosenberg, the winner of a MacArthur grant, is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her last book, The Haunted Land, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Join the Club xi

1 Turning Positive 1

2 The Empire of Irrationality 21

3 Righteous Rebels 43

4 Corporate Tools 63

5 The Calculus Club 97

6 Angels of Change 125

7 A Problem That Has No Name 159

8 The Party 211

9 The Judo of Fear 249

10 Next 283

Acknowledgments 353

Notes 355

Bibliography 371

Index 381

Editorial Reviews

A solution that is simple yet profound, and rooted in human nature.— Deirdre Donahue

USA Today

Rosenberg is an uncommonly incisive and empathetic observer.— Jonathan Liu

Boston Globe

Timely, thoughtful and important.— Jeffrey D. Sachs

New York Times Book Review

A solution that is simple yet profound, and rooted in human nature.

Deirdre Donahue - USA Today

Rosenberg is an uncommonly incisive and empathetic observer.

Jonathan Liu - Boston Globe

Timely, thoughtful and important.

Jeffrey D. Sachs - New York Times Book Review

Rosenberg valuably reminds us that the success of a society depends on the strength of its communities, because the development of our best traits—trust, honesty, foresight, responsibility and compassion—depends upon our close interactions with others. At a time when America is grappling with a decline in trust, and when cooperation across nations and cultures is extremely difficult, Rosenberg's book is timely, thoughtful and important. It illuminates one crucial piece of the complex puzzle of social ­improvement.
—The New York Times

Jeffrey D. Sachs

The ability of peer groups to affect behavioral change takes on positive connotations when applied to social activism in this ambitious, evocatively written treatment of what the author calls "the social cure." Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Rosenberg (The Haunted Land), recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, explores join-the-club strategies for progressive causes: South Africa's AIDS-awareness group, loveLife; Serbia's student-led anti-Milosevic democracy movement, Otpor; India's rural health-worker program in Jamkhed; a Christian faith-building community in suburban Chicago; and a teen-driven antismoking campaign in Florida. Overcoming the limited efficacy of the usual models—for instance, information-dispersing approaches to behavioral modification—these cases all successfully employ peer groups and in-group lifestyle campaigns in service of their respective social and political goals. Results range from decreases in teen smoking to the overthrow of oppressive governments. Citing a Brixton-based drop-in center aimed at young British Muslims, she explores the degree to which the fight against terrorism might itself be amenable to a peer group approach. Rosenberg's immersion in the issues and considered reflections on the power of peer groups to shape personal and social action brings an urgency to a strategy as old as any in civilization's arsenal. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Sweepingly ambitious...Rosenberg’s case studies are as different as they are fascinating...the ideas in Join the Club are exciting, and they immediately make one consider professional and personal obstacles in one’s own life that might be amenable to a “join the club” solution. It is an empowering idea.”

Newsweek

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tina Rosenberg spots a brewing social phenomenon: the power of groups to motivate positive changes. Using stories to illustrate this premise in action, Rosenberg describes how positive peer pressure reduced teen smoking in the U.S., improved the health and prosperity of Indian villages, helped minority students earn the highest grades, and hastened the fall of Slobodan Milosevic.

The Daily Beast

Tina Rosenberg has cracked a code that reveals how people change for the better. She has found the common humanity in human communities across the earth. Join the Club will open your mind to the ways in which we can heal our world.”

Tim Weiner

E.M. Forster bade us to "only connect," and that is the message of this splendid book, an accessible treatment of the use of peer pressure as a force for positive change, with far-reaching implications for researchers and public policymakers in both government and the private sector. "A few years ago, if anyone had asked me about the transformational ability of positive peer pressure, I would have thought of Alcoholics Anonymous," writes the MacArthur- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Rosenberg (contributing writer, New York Times Magazine; The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism) in her conclusion, "Now I see the possibilities everywhere." Her wide-ranging examples of positive results from peer pressure include the reduction in U.S. teen smoking, minority students closing the achievement gap, and other successful grassroots efforts. Although four of her accounts here were published in earlier versions, there is enough additional material to justify the purchase of this volume. VERDICT There are, to be sure, plenty of studies documenting the negative effects of peer pressure, e.g., Pamela Paul's Parenting, Inc. This book serves as an antidote. Promotional material likening it to Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point does it a grievous disservice. Highly recommended.—Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ

Library Journal