How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like - Softcover

This book is a pearl, a work of great beauty and value, built up around a simple truth: that we are essentialists, tuned in to unseen order. --Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom"

Why is an artistic masterpiece worth millions more than a convincing forgery? Pleasure works in mysterious ways, as Paul Bloom reveals in this investigation of what we desire and why. Drawing on a wealth of surprising studies, Bloom investigates pleasures noble and seamy, lofty and mundane, to reveal that our enjoyment of a given thing is determined not by what we can see and touch but by our beliefs about that thing s history, origin, and deeper nature."