TOW #4 - How To Win Friends and Influence People (IRB)

How to Win Friends and Influence People is a book by Dale Carnegie, a writer and lecturer who focused a lot on self-help and social improvement. Many of his works focus around the idea that one can influence and change the behavior of others by changing your behavior towards them. That idea is very present in How to Win Friends and Influence People. One might even say that its one of the central pillars of the book so far. Well, I'm saying it. The book is a self-help book, but I feel like that title does both the book itself and its audience injustice. The book is accessible to literally anyone who wants to improve their social skills, be it for solely interpersonal reasons, or if they want to succeed more in the business world by networking better. The book has been a standard for improving social skills since the 30's, when it was released. Its advice has stayed relevant even until today. The book utilizes many, many many anecdotes from successful people supporting exactly why the strategies Carnegie suggests would work, which is a strong appeal to ethos. I feel like the book so far is sort of lacking in logos, but that makes sense. Social "science" is more abstract than any other science, and this book was written in the 30's, so some of the information about how the brain acts in social situations wasn't available, so an imbalance in Ethos and Logos is okay. Overall, I find that Carnegie has been achieving his purpose very effectively. His purpose is to help people to function better in social situations and to interact with people more effectively without any sort of malicious manipulation. He achieves this well, because I've been using some of the strategies he outlines in the book, and I feel like I've been overall better in social situations. It's a book that's gained popularity from the testimony of those who were affected by it, and I'm tossing my lot in with them.