Miller, Peter. The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done. New York: Avery, 2010.
Morse, Eric Robert. Psychonomics: How Modern Science Aims to Conquer the Mind and How the Mind Prevails. Austin: Code Publishing, 2014.
Pagel, Mark. Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Pentland, Alex. Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Smart, Andrew. Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing. New York: OR Books, 2013.
Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor Books, 2005.
Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Liveright, 2012.
I mention mirror neurons as one of the mechanisms supporting the notion of mindless behavior. For a good introduction to them by one of their discoverers, see:
Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
For an opposing view see:
Hickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
Unlike Chalmers’s thought-experiment zombie world, where no one has real consciousness, I posit a three-state model, with each level showing progressively more complex consciousness in successively smaller cohorts. So, cheek by jowl with my p-zeds are legions of psychopaths—and there’s an enormous amount of nonfiction written about them. The seminal texts are:
Cleckley, Hervey. The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality. Various publishers; five editions from 1941 to 1984.
Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Atria, 1993.
One of Hare’s last graduate students has a fascinating (and more recent) book, from which I drew the notion of damage to the paralimbic system being a correlate of psychopathy:
Kiehl, Kent. The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience. New York: Crown, 2014.
Meanwhile, Jon Ronson looks into Hare’s famed Psychopathy Checklist—Revised in this popular account:
Ronson, Jon. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. New York: Riverhead, 2011.
As I make clear in my novel, psychopathy doesn’t necessarily lead to crazed killing sprees. Hare and his collaborator have documented the existence of psychopaths in the workplace:
Babiak, Paul, and Robert D. Hare. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: HarperBusiness, 2006.
Also on the topic of hidden psychopaths (“sociopath,” as I explain in the novel, being an essentially synonymous term):
Stout, Martha. The Sociopath Next Door. New York: Broadway Books, 2005.
And Kevin Dutton—whom I consulted with in creating this novel—contends that psychopathic traits can even be beneficiaclass="underline"
Dutton, Kevin. The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
When I was already well into the writing of my novel, James Fallon published a book about a real-life discovery that echoed some of what my character Jim Marchuk faces:
Fallon, James. The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. New York: Current, 2013.
And a book about the relationships between psychopathic men and nonpsychopathic women:
Brown, Sandra L. Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of Inevitable Harm with Psychopaths, Sociopaths, and Narcissists. Minneapolis: Book Printing Revolution, 2009.
The character of Menno Warkentin in this novel is an experimental psychologist. I’ve often said that science fiction is a laboratory for thought experiments about the human condition that it would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life—but, in the days before informed consent, there were some doozies that put my fictional Project Lucidity to shame.
Most famous of all—and, as I argue in this novel, pretty clear evidence of philosopher’s zombies in our midst—is the Milgram shock-machine obedience-to-authority study from 1961. Milgram himself recounts it here:
Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
And his life and work are explored in:
Blass, Thomas. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
And for a largely opposing viewpoint on Milgram’s work, see:
Perry, Gina. Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. New York: The New Press, 2013.
Then there’s Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Guard experiment from 1971:
Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.
Milgram was influenced by this famous analysis of the trial of one of the Nazi war criminals, who, in the taxonomy presented in this novel, was almost certainly a Q1:
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963.
Two more recent books on how Q2s could influence the masses of Q1s, the latter extensively citing Bob Altemeyer:
Rees, Laurence. Hitler’s Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss. New York: Pantheon, 2013.
Dean, John W. Conservatives Without Conscience. New York: Viking, 2006.
I’m often called an optimistic writer, and my visions of the future tend to shade toward the utopian. I like to think that’s not simple naïveté, and this novel is my attempt to grapple with the notion of human evil, a topic explored in fascinating depth in:
Baumeister, Roy F. Eviclass="underline" Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. New York: W.H. Freeman & Company, 1996.
A couple of more recent treatments, based in neuroscience:
Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Science of Eviclass="underline" On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Bloom, Paul. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown, 2013.
My character of Jim Marchuk is a utilitarian philosopher. Peter Singer is the best-known living utilitarian. His classic text is:
Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics, Third Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
A good overview of his thought (including his famously controversial views on abortion, animal rights, infanticide, and euthanasia, some of which Jim Marchuk echoes in my novel) is:
Singer, Peter. Writings on an Ethical Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
On the obligation Jim Marchuk discusses of utilitarians to support third-world charities, see:
Singer, Peter. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. New York: Random House, 2009.