So why are you reading ihe preface? The book doesn't really gel going for another 10 pages, so why are you here instead of there? Are you the kind of person who just can't stand the idea of missing something? Are you trying to justify the cost of the book by consuming ever)' word? Did you just open to this page out of habit? Are you starting to think that might have been a major mistake?

For as long as we can remember, the three of us have been asking questions like these about ourselves, about our friends, and about anyone else who didn't run away fast enough. Our curiosity about why people think, feel, and act as they do drew each of us into our first psychology course, and though we remember being swept away by the lectures, we don't remember anything about the textbooks. That's probably because our textbooks were little more than colorful encyclopedias of facts, names, and dates. Little wonder that we sold our books back the moment we finished our final exams.

When we became psychology professors, we did the things that psychology profes- sors often do: We taught classes, we conducted research, and we wore argyle socks long after they stopped being fashionable. We also wrote popular books that people really liked to read, and that made us wonder why no one had ever written an intro- ductory psychology textbook that students really liked to read. After all, psychology is the most interesting subject in the known universe, so why shouldn't a psychology textbook be the most interesting thing in a students backpack? We couldn't think of a reason, so we sat down and wrote the book that we wished we'd been given as students. Psychology was published in 2008 and the reaction was astounding. We'd never written a textbook before so we didn't know exactly what to expect, but never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that we would win the Pulitzer Prize!

Which was good, because we didn't. But we did gel unsolicited letters and e-mails from students all over the country who wrote just to tell us how much they liked our book. They liked the content because, as we may have already mentioned, psychology is the most interesting subject in the known universe. But they also liked the fact that our textbook didn't sound like a textbook. It wasn't written in the stodgy voice of the announcer from one of those nature films we all saw in 7th-grade biology ("Behold the sea otter, natures furry little scavenger"). Rather, it was written in our voices: the same voices we used to write books for ordinary people who didn't have highlighters in their hands and were allowed to throw the hook away if they got bored. We made a conscious effort to tell the story1 of psychology—to integrate topics rather than just listing them, to illustrate ideas rather than just describing them. We recognized that because science is such a complicated and serious business, some teachers might think that a science textbook should be complicated and serious too. But we just didn't see it that way ourselves. Writing a textbook is the art of making complicated things seem simple and making serious things seem fun. The students who wrote to us seemed to agree.