The rise of social media has led to an age of digital dissent; we’re constantly at each other’s throats these days. So what’s making us seem so unreasonable to our peers and how can we overcome our own innate prejudices? Bristol-based academic and cultural-values whizz Kirsty Sedgman takes a measured, considered look at the subject of reasonableness and how we apply it in this chatty, informal book that offers wide-ranging research to back up her theories.

‘All progress depends on the unreasonable man’, is her contention; Sedgman kicks off with the surprising degree to which we seek out and trust the company of strangers, and why this cornerstone of our existence has abruptly changed in recent times. So if a person becomes a person through interaction with other people, as Xhosa philosophy contends, what happens when our conflicting value systems rub each other the wrong way? Sedgman notes that a Socratic sense of stoicism has served us well in the past, but systems often change for the better due to unreasonable actions that challenge the status quo, so why bother conforming at all?

This is, as Sedgman says, ‘a book about behaviour’, examining the roots of reasonable and unreasonable behaviour in two main segments. While current social-media trends provide many of the examples, Sedgman also looks at the historical context behind our current, abrasive discourse, ending with a resolute call to arms. Her prose style is airy and accessible, mixing historical examples with wry personal anecdotes, switching from Martin Luther King’s notions of anti-violent protest to her husband’s snoring in the space of a few lines. By the end, you may well agree with Sedgman that, in today’s contorted world, multiple wrongs might just make a right. Or as her musical heroine Matilda says, ‘sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty’.

Published by Faber on Thursday 16 February.