Customers choose companies and brands based on their perceptions of the organizations’ warmth and competence — the same criteria we use to judge other people, argue psychology and public affairs professor Susan Fiske and Chris Malone in The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies (Jossey-Bass). Companies that put customers’ interests ahead of their own, they write, activate our automatic perceptions of their warmth and competence.
French professor Thomas Trezise writes about those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors in Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (Fordham University Press). The view that such trauma is unspeakable can inhibit victims from giving their testimony, he argues.
In Redeeming The Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece (Princeton University Press), Maurizio Viroli, a professor of politics emeritus, offers a new understanding of The Prince. Rather than being a bible of unscrupulous politics, The Prince, Viroli suggests, is actually about political redemption.