Move Fast and Break Things Jonathan Taplin PAN MACMILLAN (2018) With Facebook, Google and Amazon monopolizing consumer culture, digital-media expert Jonathan Taplin argues that their dominance is an economic war as well as a cultural one. His solution? A “digital renaissance” returning to principles of decentralization. Resurrecting the Shark Susan Ewing PEGASUS (2018) Helicoprion, a bizarre prehistoric shark with teeth set in a spiral whorl, swam the oceans more than 270 million years ago. It remains shrouded in mystery. Susan Ewing traces how the fossil obsessed scientists for centuries, and how new research could resolve how its teeth fit into its jaw. A few years after the Second World War, Muzafer Sherif conducted possibly the most complex field studies ever attempted in social psychol- ogy. Sited in summer camps around the United States, they focused on conflict and cooperation within and between two groups of about a dozen 11- and 12-year-old boys. The children were never informed that they were taking part in research. In each study, Sherif and his fellow researchers spent up to three weeks disguised as counsellors and caretakers, manipulating features of the camp set-up — in particular, the structure of team competitions and challenges — to examine their impact on group relations. In The Lost Boys, Gina Perry puts these extraordinary experiments under the microscope. As in her 2013 book Behind the Shock Machine, which probed psycholo- gist Stanley Milgram’s 1960s research on obedience, she is unsatisfied with the half- truths lazily handed down in textbooks. Her aim is to make a distinctive contribution to the current debate about replication and reproducibility in social psychology. She goes in search of the stories behind the research, in particular reassessing Sherif’s legacy through the recollections of study partici- pants and research collaborators. The result is an enlightening read, and a ripping yarn. All three studies featured a phase in which the two groups competed for scarce resources such as prized penknives. In other respects, their designs were quite dif- ferent. In the 1949 and 1953 studies, the boys underwent a phase of making friends. They were then assigned to one of two dis- tinct groups that cut across friendship lines. PSYCHOLOGY War and peace and summer camp Alex Haslam appraises an account of key psychology experiments on conflict and cooperation. 306 | NATURE | VOL 556 | 19 APRIL 2018 SPRING BOOKS COMMENT ©2018MacmillanPublishersLimited,partofSpringerNature.Allrightsreserved.