Professor Elfenbein Publishes Fourth Book

Cheers to Professor and Chair Andrew Elfenbein on the publication of his fourth book The Gist of Reading (Stanford University Press). The book explains how we read today, as a combination of two kinds of mental work: automatic and controlled processes. But it also uses current knowledge about reading to consider readers of past centuries. In "How We Read," a blog post about the book, Professor Elfenbein provides 10 surprising insights about how we process, recall, and engage with what we read: he wanted to "bring reading, rather than interpretation, to the foreground," he writes, and ended up turning to empirical psychology "which presented me with an image of reading quite different from the one that I had known."

The cover of the book was recognized as a "book cover of note" for January.