Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational – Michael Shermer (2024)
From the publisher: Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking. Long a fringe part of the American political landscape, conspiracy theories are now mainstream: 147 members of Congress voted in favor of objections to the 2020 presidential election based on an unproven theory...Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Minefield in Real Relationships – Scott Rick (2024)
From the publisher: Have you ever asked yourself “What if I’m a tightwad and my significant other is a spendthrift?” or vice versa? Scott Rick, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, knows that many people do. He also knows that the financial aspects of an intimate relationship can become...Behavioral Economics for Leaders: Research-Based Insights on the Weird, Irrational, and Wonderful Ways Humans Navigate the Workplace – Matthias Sutter (2023)
From the publisher: Every leader should know the surprising research and strange conclusions of behavioral economics--for fairness, teamwork and productivity You and your colleagues don’t always make rational decisions. Sometimes that's a problem that leaders must address, and and sometimes that can be a good thing--when employees put their colleagues interests ahead of their own....Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things – Dan Ariely (2023)
From the publisher: Misinformation affects us daily, from social media to politics and even personal relationships. Policing social media alone cannot solve the complex problem shaped by partisan politics and subjective interpretations of truth. In Misbelief social scientist Dan Ariely explores the behavior of 'misbelief' that leads people to distrust accepted truths and embrace conspiracy...Think Bigger: How to Innovate – Sheena Iyengar (2023)
From the publisher: In Think Bigger, Sheena Iyengar―an acclaimed author and expert in the science of choice―answers a timeless question with enormous implications for problems of all kinds across the world: “How can I get my best ideas?” Iyengar provides essential tools to spark creative thinking and help us make our most meaningful choices. She...Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work – Uri Gneezy (2023)
From the publisher: An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world. Incentives send powerful signals that aim to influence behavior. But often there is a conflict between what we say and what we...Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today – Hal Hershfield (2023)
From the publisher: Based on over a decade of research, psychologist Hal Hershfield explores how connecting with our future selves can both improve our lives right now and help us achieve our goals and hopes for the future. We've all had the desire to travel through time and see what our lives will be like...Beyond Self-Interest: Why the Market Rewards Those Who Reject It – Krzysztof Pelc (2022)
From the publisher: We've learned that the way to get ahead is through strong will, grit and naked ambition. The belief that self-interest makes the world go round has served us well: it has helped make our society more affluent. But does that premise still hold? In Beyond Self-Interest, Krzysztof Pelc argues that those who prosper...Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow’s Challenges – Sam Tatam (2022)
From the publisher: When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake? In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioural science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something...Cognitive Biases in a Nutshell: How to Spot and Stop the Hiccups in our Thinking Process – Thinknetic (2022)
From the publisher: We’re all biased. You may have read the above and already your mind is raising its defenses. No … not me. I haven’t got a biased bone in my body. The fact is: you do. So does everyone around you. Several scientific studies, in fact, suggest that certain forms of bias may...The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters – Eric J. Johnson (2022)
From the publisher: How do you get people to agree to donate their organs? What’s the trick to reading a wine list? What’s the perfect number of potential matches a dating site should offer? Every time we make a choice, our minds go through an elaborate process most of us never even notice. We’re influenced...How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be – Katy Milkman (2021)
From the publisher: How to Change is a powerful, groundbreaking blueprint to help you - and anyone you manage, teach or coach - to achieve personal and professional goals, from the master of human nature and behavior change and Choiceology podcast host Professor Katy Milkman. Award-winning Wharton Professor Katy Milkman has devoted her career to the...Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters – Steven Pinker (2021)
From the publisher: Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding--and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing? Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational--cavemen out of...Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – Adam Grant (2021)
From the publisher: Discover the critical art of rethinking: how questioning your opinions can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, the most crucial skill may be the ability to rethink and unlearn. Recent global...Why Trust Matters: An Economist’s Guide to the Ties That Bind Us – Benjamin Ho (2021)
From the publisher: Benjamin Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices. From contracts and banking to blockchain and the sharing economy...Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment – Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein (2021)
From the publisher: From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias. Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to...100% Right 50% of the Time – Yossi Yassour (2021)
From the publisher: Yossi Yassour, an Israeli bestselling author and esteemed professor of Business Administration, presents the fascinating field of decision-making in a clear, humorous, and accessible language, to allow you to make the decisions that are most right for you. You are watching a reality TV show you enjoy. At the same time, a...Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments – Stefan H. Thomke (2020)
From the publisher: When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce...The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World – Michael Luca & Max H. Bazerman (2020)
From the publisher: How organizations-including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook-learn from experiments in a data-driven world. Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments-also known as randomized controlled trials-designed to test the impact of...The Behaviour Business: How to Apply Behavioural Science for Business Success – Richard Chataway (2020)
From the publisher: If you are in business, you are in the business of behaviour and unless a business influences behaviour, it will not succeed. In the last 50 years we have learnt more about how we behave than over the previous 5000. This book shows how behavioural science has revolutionised our understanding of how...Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding – Bobby Duffy (2019)
From the publisher: How often are women harassed? What percentage of the population are immigrants? How bad is unemployment? These questions are important, but most of us get the answers wrong. Research shows that people often wildly misunderstand the state of the world, regardless of age, sex, or education. And though the internet brings us...Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life – Nir Eyal (2019)
From the publisher: We are living through a crisis of distraction. Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done. Why does it feel like we're distracting our lives away? In Indistractable, behavioral designer Nir Eyal shows what life could look like if you followed through on your intentions. Instead of suggesting...Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, And Why – Stephen Martin & Joseph Marks (2019)
From the publisher: Why are self-confident ignoramuses so often believed? Why are thoughtful experts so often given the cold shoulder? And why do apparently irrelevant details such as a person’s height, their relative wealth, or their Facebook photo influence whether or not we trust what they are saying? When deciding whether or not someone is...The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business – David Courtwright (2019)
From the publisher: From a leading expert on addiction, a provocative, singularly authoritative history of how sophisticated global businesses have targeted the human brain’s reward centers, driving us to addictions ranging from oxycodone to Big Macs to Assassin’s Creed to Snapchat―with alarming social consequences. We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and...An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk – Allison Schrager (2019)
From the publisher: Is it worth swimming in shark-infested waters to surf a 50-foot, career-record wave? Is it riskier to make an action movie or a horror movie? Should sex workers forfeit 50 percent of their income for added security or take a chance and keep the extra money? Most people wouldn't expect an economist...How Change Happens – Cass Sunstein (2019)
From the publisher: The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely...Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most – Steven Johnson (2018)
From the publisher: Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they're also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There's no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums. Steven Johnson's classic...When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing – Daniel H. Pink (2018)
From the publisher: Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an...The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect – Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie (2018)
From the publisher: "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality--the study of cause and...Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World… and Why Things Are Better Than You Think – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling & Anna Rosling Rönnlund (2018)
From the publisher: Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends―what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school―we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing...The Misguided Mind: Correct Everyday Thinking Errors, Be Less Irrational, And Improve Your Decision Making – Steven Schuster (2018)
From the publisher: Does your impulsive thinking bring only trouble? Do you often grab your head muttering “what was I thinking?” There is a reason: our first, instinctual thoughts and actions are usually irrational and self-sabotaging. The Misguided Mind will tell you why and also how can you correct it. We make thinking errors on...Behavioral Economics: The Basics – Philip Corr & Anke Plagnol (2018)
From the publisher: Behavioral economics is everywhere – whether used by governments to shape our judgement and decision making, advertisers and marketers to sell products, or even politicians to sell policies, its insights are important and far-reaching. Behavioral Economics: The Basics is the first book to provide a rigorous yet accessible overview of the growing field...Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World – Andrew Leigh (2018)
From the publisher: Experiments have consistently been used in the hard sciences, but in recent decades social scientists have adopted the practice. Randomized trials have been used to design policies to increase educational attainment, lower crime rates, elevate employment rates, and improve living standards among the poor. This book tells the stories of radical researchers...The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioral Biases that Influence What We Buy – Richard Shotton (2018)
From the publisher: Before you can influence decisions, you need to understand what drives them. In The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton sets out to help you learn. By observing a typical day of decision-making, from trivial food choices to significant work-place moves, he investigates how our behavior is shaped by psychological shortcuts. With a clear...Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts – Annie Duke (2018)
From the publisher: In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a hand off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted and the...Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter – Dan Ariely & Jeff Kreisler (2017)
From the publisher: Why is paying for things painful? Why are we comfortable overpaying for something in the present just because we've overpaid for it in the past? Why is it easy to pay $4 for a soda on vacation, when we wouldn't spend more than $1 on that same soda at our local grocery...Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought – Andrew W. Lo (2017)
From the publisher: A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior. Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe--and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest....Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together… and Why It Could Drive Us Apart – Rachel Botsman (2017)
From the publisher: If you can't trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust -- far from it. In this revolutionary book, world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the...Honours versus Money: The Economics of Awards – Bruno S. Frey & Jana Gallus (2017)
From the publisher: Honours fulfil one of the most fundamental desires of human beings, namely, to be recognised and held in esteem by others. There are thousands of awards in all areas of society: the state, arts and media, sports, religion, the voluntary sector, academia, and business. Awards are well visible, can raise the recipients'...Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities – Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro (2017)
From the publisher: Economists often act as if their methods explain all human behavior. But in Cents and Sensibility, an eminent literary critic and a leading economist make the case that the humanities, especially the study of literature, offer economists ways to make their models more realistic, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more...The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone – Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach (2017)
From the publisher: Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live...The Enigma of Reason – Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber (2017)
From the publisher: Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn’t it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings...The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science – Cass R. Sunstein (2016)
From the publisher: In recent years, 'Nudge Units' or 'Behavioral Insights Teams' have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book,...The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World – Michael Lewis (2016)
From the publisher: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors: Kahneman a rootless son of holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved; Tversky a voluble, instinctual blur of energy. In this breathtaking new book, Michael Lewis tells the extraordinary story of...Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes our Motivations – Dan Ariely (2016)
From the publisher: Bestselling author Dan Ariely reveals fascinating new insights into motivation showing that the subject is far more complex than we ever imagined. Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way, much of what we...Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade – Robert Cialdini (2016)
From the publisher: The author of the legendary bestseller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn’t lie in the message itself, but in the key moment before that message is delivered. What separates effective communicators from truly successful persuaders? Using the same combination of rigorous...Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction – Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner (2016)
From the publisher: Everything we do involves forecasts about how the future will unfold. Whether buying a new house or changing job, designing a new product or getting married, our decisions are governed by implicit predictions of how things are likely to turn out. The problem is, we're not very good at it. In a...Understanding Consumer Financial Behavior: Money Management in an Age of Financial Illiteracy – W. Fred van Raaij (2016)
From the publisher: Government policies, marketing campaigns of banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, and consumers' protective actions all depend on assumptions about consumer financial behavior. Unfortunately, many consumers have no or little knowledge of budgeting, financial products, and financial planning. It is therefore important that organizations and market authorities know why consumers spend,...This Is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon – L. Jon Wertheim & Sam Sommers (2016)
From the publisher: This is Your Brain on Sports is the book for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them. Sports Illustrated executive editor and bestselling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild ride...Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World – Steven Quartz & Anette Asp (2016)
From the publisher: If you have ever wondered why SUVs replaced minivans, how one rap song turned the cognac industry upside down, or what gives Levi's jeans their iconic allure, look no further-in Cool, Steven Quartz and Anette Asp finally explain the fascinating science behind unexpected trends and enduring successes. We live in a world...Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception – George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller (2015)
From the publisher: Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help...Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success – Matthew Syed (2015)
From the publisher: Whether developing a new product, honing a core skill or just trying to get a critical decision right, Black Box Thinkers aren't afraid to face up to mistakes. In fact, Black Box Thinkers see failure as the very best way to learn. Rather than denying their mistakes, blaming others, or attempting to...Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference – David Halpern (2015)
From the publisher: Every day we make countless decisions, from the small, mundane things to tackling life’s big questions, but we don’t always make the right choices. Behavioural scientist Dr David Halpern heads up Number 10’s ‘Nudge Unit’, the world’s first government institution that uses behavioural economics to examine and influence human behaviour, to ‘nudge’...Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking – Richard Nisbett (2015)
From the publisher: Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behaviour and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research, Richard Nisbett presents...The Biased Mind: How Evolution Shaped our Psychology Including Anecdotes and Tips for Making Sound Decisions – Jerome Boutang & Michel De Lara (2015)
From the publisher: Using a wealth of anecdotes, data from academic literature, and original research, this very accessible little book highlights how we all struggle to cope with the maelstrom of choices, influences and experiences that come our way. The authors have slogged through piles of dry research papers to provide many wonderful nuggets of...Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions – Gerd Gigerenzer (2015)
From the publisher: A fascinating, practical guide to making better decisions with our money, health and personal lives from Gerd Gigerenzer, the author of Reckoning with Risk. Numbers don't lie - but they often mislead us. From health risks to financial decisions, we often find it hard to make decisions because the statistics have been...Behavioral Marketing: Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale – Dave Walters (2015)
From the publisher: Behavioral Marketing guides you in using relatively new marketing tactics to grow revenue and create process efficiencies. An incredibly valuable text, this book defines the key principles of behavioral marketing including customer journey mapping, channel–level planning, data capture and hygiene, campaign creation, delivery best practices, and measurement/optimization and shows you how to...Behavioral Economics and Public Health – Christina Roberto & Ichiro Kawachi (2015)
From the publisher: Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices?...Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles – Dan Ariely (2015)
From the publisher: Three-time New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely teams up with legendary The New Yorker cartoonist William Haefeli to present an expanded, illustrated collection of his immensely popular Wall Street Journal advice column, “Ask Ariely”. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely revolutionized the way we think about ourselves, our minds, and our actions in his books Predictably Irrational, The Upside...Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice – Cass R. Sunstein (2015)
From the publisher: Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood...Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics – Richard Thaler (2015)
From the publisher: Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics...Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives – Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir (2014)
From the publisher: In this provocative book based on cutting-edge research, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that scarcity creates a distinct psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail...Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think – Paul Dolan (2014)
From the publisher: This is not just another happiness book. In Happiness by Design, happiness and behavior expert Paul Dolan combines the latest insights from economics and psychology to illustrate that in order to be happy we must behave happy Our happiness is experiences of both pleasure and purpose over time and it depends on what...The Behavior Change Wheel: A Guide To Designing Interventions – Susan Michie, Lou Atkins & Robert West (2014)
From the publisher: This is a practical guide to designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions and policies. It is based on the Behaviour Change Wheel, a synthesis of 19 behaviour change frameworks that draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches. The guide is for policy makers, practitioners, intervention designers and researchers and introduces...The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life – Uri Gneezy & John List (2013)
From the publisher: Can economics be passionate?… Can it center on people and what really matters to them day-in and day-out.… And help us understand their hidden motives for why they do what they do in everyday life? Uri Gneezy and John List are revolutionaries. Their ideas and methods for revealing what really works in...The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves – Dan Ariely (2012)
From the publisher: Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and the New York Times bestselling author of The Upside of Irrationality and Predictably Irrational, examines the contradictory forces that drive us to cheat and keep us honest, in this groundbreaking look at the way we behave: The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. From ticket-fixing in our police departments to test-score scandals in our schools,...Willpower: Why Self-Control is the Secret of Success – Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney (2011)
From the publisher: Pioneering research psychologist Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control. Drawing on cutting-edge research and the wisdom of real-life experts, Willpower shares lessons on how to focus our strength, resist temptation, and redirect our lives. It shows readers how to...The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Charles Duhigg (2011)
From the publisher: In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to sidelines of the NFL to...Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman (2011)
From the publisher: In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more...Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer – Duncan J. Watts (2011)
From the publisher: Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO’s impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard? If...The Art of Choosing – Sheena Iyengar (2010)
From the publisher: Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes...Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard – Chip Heath & Dan Heath (2010)
From the publisher: We all know that change is hard. It's unsettling, it's time-consuming, and all too often we give up at the first sign of a setback. But why do we insist on seeing the obstacles rather than the goal? This is the question that bestselling authors Chip and Dan Heath tackle in their...The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World – Tim Harford (2009)
From the publisher: Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your...How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer (2009)
From the publisher: The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we “blink” and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind’s black box with the...Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism – George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller (2009)
From the publisher: The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the...Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions – Dan Ariely (2008)
From the publisher: Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup? When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're making...Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making – Gerd Gigerenzer (2008)
From the publisher: In Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making psychologist and behavioural expert Gerd Gigerenzer reveals the secrets of fast and effective decision-making. A sportsman can catch a ball without calculating its speed or distance. A group of amateurs beat the experts at playing the stock market. A man falls for the...Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness – Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein (2008)
From the publisher: Nudge is about choices—how we make them and how we can make better ones. Drawing on decades of research in the fields of behavioral science and economics, authors Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein offer a new perspective on preventing the countless mistakes we make—ill-advised personal investments, consumption of unhealthy foods, neglect...Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us – Daniel H. Pink (2008)
From the publisher: Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work,...Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think – Brian Wansink (2006)
From the publisher: In this illuminating and groundbreaking new book, food psychologist Brian Wansink shows why you may not realize how much you’re eating, what you’re eating–or why you’re even eating at all. • Does food with a brand name really taste better? • Do you hate brussels sprouts because your mother did? • Does...Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell (2005)
From the publisher: In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually...Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science – Charles Wheelan (2002)
From the publisher: Finally! A book about economics that won’t put you to sleep. In fact, you won’t be able to put this bestseller down. In our challenging economic climate, this perennial favorite of students and general readers is more than a good read, it’s a necessary investment—with a blessedly sure rate of return. Demystifying...Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2001)
From the publisher: Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. Nassim Nicholas Talebveteran trader, renowned risk expert, polymathic scholar, erudite raconteur, and New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swanhas written a modern classic that turns on its head what we believe...Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything – Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (2001)
From the publisher: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday...Irrational Exuberance – Robert J. Shiller (2000)
From the publisher: As Robert Shiller’s new 2009 preface to his prescient classic on behavioral economics and market volatility asserts, the irrational exuberance of the stock and housing markets “has been ended by an economic crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” As we all, ordinary Americans and professional...Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics – Gary Belsky & Thomas Gilovich (1999)
From the publisher: A fascinating and practical manual: Looking at the ways we spend, save, borrow, invest, and waste money, Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich reveal the psychology underlying irrational financial behavior. Entertaining case studies illustrate common patterns of thinking and show readers how changing their habits can protect and grow their assets. New information...Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping – Paco Underhill (1999)
From the publisher: Revolutionary retail guru Paco Underhill is back with a completely revised edition of his classic, witty bestselling book on our ever-evolving consumer culture -- full of fresh observations and important lessons from the cutting edge of retail, which is taking place in the world's emerging markets. New material includes: • The latest...Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert B. Cialdini (1993)
From the publisher: Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say "yes"—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves...
Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational – Michael Shermer (2024)
From the publisher: Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking. Long a fringe part of the American political landscape, conspiracy theories are now mainstream: 147 members of Congress voted in favor of objections to the 2020 presidential election based on an unproven theory...
Tightwads and Spendthrifts: Navigating the Money Minefield in Real Relationships – Scott Rick (2024)
From the publisher: Have you ever asked yourself “What if I’m a tightwad and my significant other is a spendthrift?” or vice versa? Scott Rick, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, knows that many people do. He also knows that the financial aspects of an intimate relationship can become...
Behavioral Economics for Leaders: Research-Based Insights on the Weird, Irrational, and Wonderful Ways Humans Navigate the Workplace – Matthias Sutter (2023)
From the publisher: Every leader should know the surprising research and strange conclusions of behavioral economics--for fairness, teamwork and productivity You and your colleagues don’t always make rational decisions. Sometimes that's a problem that leaders must address, and and sometimes that can be a good thing--when employees put their colleagues interests ahead of their own....
Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things – Dan Ariely (2023)
From the publisher: Misinformation affects us daily, from social media to politics and even personal relationships. Policing social media alone cannot solve the complex problem shaped by partisan politics and subjective interpretations of truth. In Misbelief social scientist Dan Ariely explores the behavior of 'misbelief' that leads people to distrust accepted truths and embrace conspiracy...
Think Bigger: How to Innovate – Sheena Iyengar (2023)
From the publisher: In Think Bigger, Sheena Iyengar―an acclaimed author and expert in the science of choice―answers a timeless question with enormous implications for problems of all kinds across the world: “How can I get my best ideas?” Iyengar provides essential tools to spark creative thinking and help us make our most meaningful choices. She...
Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work – Uri Gneezy (2023)
From the publisher: An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world. Incentives send powerful signals that aim to influence behavior. But often there is a conflict between what we say and what we...
Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today – Hal Hershfield (2023)
From the publisher: Based on over a decade of research, psychologist Hal Hershfield explores how connecting with our future selves can both improve our lives right now and help us achieve our goals and hopes for the future. We've all had the desire to travel through time and see what our lives will be like...
Beyond Self-Interest: Why the Market Rewards Those Who Reject It – Krzysztof Pelc (2022)
From the publisher: We've learned that the way to get ahead is through strong will, grit and naked ambition. The belief that self-interest makes the world go round has served us well: it has helped make our society more affluent. But does that premise still hold? In Beyond Self-Interest, Krzysztof Pelc argues that those who prosper...
Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow’s Challenges – Sam Tatam (2022)
From the publisher: When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake? In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioural science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something...
Cognitive Biases in a Nutshell: How to Spot and Stop the Hiccups in our Thinking Process – Thinknetic (2022)
From the publisher: We’re all biased. You may have read the above and already your mind is raising its defenses. No … not me. I haven’t got a biased bone in my body. The fact is: you do. So does everyone around you. Several scientific studies, in fact, suggest that certain forms of bias may...
The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters – Eric J. Johnson (2022)
From the publisher: How do you get people to agree to donate their organs? What’s the trick to reading a wine list? What’s the perfect number of potential matches a dating site should offer? Every time we make a choice, our minds go through an elaborate process most of us never even notice. We’re influenced...
How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be – Katy Milkman (2021)
From the publisher: How to Change is a powerful, groundbreaking blueprint to help you - and anyone you manage, teach or coach - to achieve personal and professional goals, from the master of human nature and behavior change and Choiceology podcast host Professor Katy Milkman. Award-winning Wharton Professor Katy Milkman has devoted her career to the...
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters – Steven Pinker (2021)
From the publisher: Today humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding--and also appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing? Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational--cavemen out of...
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – Adam Grant (2021)
From the publisher: Discover the critical art of rethinking: how questioning your opinions can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, the most crucial skill may be the ability to rethink and unlearn. Recent global...
Why Trust Matters: An Economist’s Guide to the Ties That Bind Us – Benjamin Ho (2021)
From the publisher: Benjamin Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices. From contracts and banking to blockchain and the sharing economy...
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment – Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein (2021)
From the publisher: From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias. Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to...
100% Right 50% of the Time – Yossi Yassour (2021)
From the publisher: Yossi Yassour, an Israeli bestselling author and esteemed professor of Business Administration, presents the fascinating field of decision-making in a clear, humorous, and accessible language, to allow you to make the decisions that are most right for you. You are watching a reality TV show you enjoy. At the same time, a...
Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments – Stefan H. Thomke (2020)
From the publisher: When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce...
The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World – Michael Luca & Max H. Bazerman (2020)
From the publisher: How organizations-including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook-learn from experiments in a data-driven world. Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments-also known as randomized controlled trials-designed to test the impact of...
The Behaviour Business: How to Apply Behavioural Science for Business Success – Richard Chataway (2020)
From the publisher: If you are in business, you are in the business of behaviour and unless a business influences behaviour, it will not succeed. In the last 50 years we have learnt more about how we behave than over the previous 5000. This book shows how behavioural science has revolutionised our understanding of how...
Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding – Bobby Duffy (2019)
From the publisher: How often are women harassed? What percentage of the population are immigrants? How bad is unemployment? These questions are important, but most of us get the answers wrong. Research shows that people often wildly misunderstand the state of the world, regardless of age, sex, or education. And though the internet brings us...
Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life – Nir Eyal (2019)
From the publisher: We are living through a crisis of distraction. Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done. Why does it feel like we're distracting our lives away? In Indistractable, behavioral designer Nir Eyal shows what life could look like if you followed through on your intentions. Instead of suggesting...
Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, And Why – Stephen Martin & Joseph Marks (2019)
From the publisher: Why are self-confident ignoramuses so often believed? Why are thoughtful experts so often given the cold shoulder? And why do apparently irrelevant details such as a person’s height, their relative wealth, or their Facebook photo influence whether or not we trust what they are saying? When deciding whether or not someone is...
The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business – David Courtwright (2019)
From the publisher: From a leading expert on addiction, a provocative, singularly authoritative history of how sophisticated global businesses have targeted the human brain’s reward centers, driving us to addictions ranging from oxycodone to Big Macs to Assassin’s Creed to Snapchat―with alarming social consequences. We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and...
An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk – Allison Schrager (2019)
From the publisher: Is it worth swimming in shark-infested waters to surf a 50-foot, career-record wave? Is it riskier to make an action movie or a horror movie? Should sex workers forfeit 50 percent of their income for added security or take a chance and keep the extra money? Most people wouldn't expect an economist...
How Change Happens – Cass Sunstein (2019)
From the publisher: The different ways that social change happens, from unleashing to nudging to social cascades. How does social change happen? When do social movements take off? Sexual harassment was once something that women had to endure; now a movement has risen up against it. White nationalist sentiments, on the other hand, were largely...
Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most – Steven Johnson (2018)
From the publisher: Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they're also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There's no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums. Steven Johnson's classic...
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing – Daniel H. Pink (2018)
From the publisher: Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an...
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect – Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie (2018)
From the publisher: "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality--the study of cause and...
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World… and Why Things Are Better Than You Think – Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling & Anna Rosling Rönnlund (2018)
From the publisher: Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends―what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school―we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing...
The Misguided Mind: Correct Everyday Thinking Errors, Be Less Irrational, And Improve Your Decision Making – Steven Schuster (2018)
From the publisher: Does your impulsive thinking bring only trouble? Do you often grab your head muttering “what was I thinking?” There is a reason: our first, instinctual thoughts and actions are usually irrational and self-sabotaging. The Misguided Mind will tell you why and also how can you correct it. We make thinking errors on...
Behavioral Economics: The Basics – Philip Corr & Anke Plagnol (2018)
From the publisher: Behavioral economics is everywhere – whether used by governments to shape our judgement and decision making, advertisers and marketers to sell products, or even politicians to sell policies, its insights are important and far-reaching. Behavioral Economics: The Basics is the first book to provide a rigorous yet accessible overview of the growing field...
Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World – Andrew Leigh (2018)
From the publisher: Experiments have consistently been used in the hard sciences, but in recent decades social scientists have adopted the practice. Randomized trials have been used to design policies to increase educational attainment, lower crime rates, elevate employment rates, and improve living standards among the poor. This book tells the stories of radical researchers...
The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioral Biases that Influence What We Buy – Richard Shotton (2018)
From the publisher: Before you can influence decisions, you need to understand what drives them. In The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton sets out to help you learn. By observing a typical day of decision-making, from trivial food choices to significant work-place moves, he investigates how our behavior is shaped by psychological shortcuts. With a clear...
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts – Annie Duke (2018)
From the publisher: In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a hand off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted and the...
Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter – Dan Ariely & Jeff Kreisler (2017)
From the publisher: Why is paying for things painful? Why are we comfortable overpaying for something in the present just because we've overpaid for it in the past? Why is it easy to pay $4 for a soda on vacation, when we wouldn't spend more than $1 on that same soda at our local grocery...
Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought – Andrew W. Lo (2017)
From the publisher: A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior. Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can't agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe--and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest....
Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together… and Why It Could Drive Us Apart – Rachel Botsman (2017)
From the publisher: If you can't trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust -- far from it. In this revolutionary book, world-renowned trust expert Rachel Botsman reveals that we are at the...
Honours versus Money: The Economics of Awards – Bruno S. Frey & Jana Gallus (2017)
From the publisher: Honours fulfil one of the most fundamental desires of human beings, namely, to be recognised and held in esteem by others. There are thousands of awards in all areas of society: the state, arts and media, sports, religion, the voluntary sector, academia, and business. Awards are well visible, can raise the recipients'...
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities – Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro (2017)
From the publisher: Economists often act as if their methods explain all human behavior. But in Cents and Sensibility, an eminent literary critic and a leading economist make the case that the humanities, especially the study of literature, offer economists ways to make their models more realistic, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more...
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone – Steven Sloman & Philip Fernbach (2017)
From the publisher: Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live...
The Enigma of Reason – Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber (2017)
From the publisher: Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn’t it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings...
The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science – Cass R. Sunstein (2016)
From the publisher: In recent years, 'Nudge Units' or 'Behavioral Insights Teams' have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book,...
The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World – Michael Lewis (2016)
From the publisher: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors: Kahneman a rootless son of holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved; Tversky a voluble, instinctual blur of energy. In this breathtaking new book, Michael Lewis tells the extraordinary story of...
Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes our Motivations – Dan Ariely (2016)
From the publisher: Bestselling author Dan Ariely reveals fascinating new insights into motivation showing that the subject is far more complex than we ever imagined. Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way, much of what we...
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade – Robert Cialdini (2016)
From the publisher: The author of the legendary bestseller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn’t lie in the message itself, but in the key moment before that message is delivered. What separates effective communicators from truly successful persuaders? Using the same combination of rigorous...
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction – Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner (2016)
From the publisher: Everything we do involves forecasts about how the future will unfold. Whether buying a new house or changing job, designing a new product or getting married, our decisions are governed by implicit predictions of how things are likely to turn out. The problem is, we're not very good at it. In a...
Understanding Consumer Financial Behavior: Money Management in an Age of Financial Illiteracy – W. Fred van Raaij (2016)
From the publisher: Government policies, marketing campaigns of banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, and consumers' protective actions all depend on assumptions about consumer financial behavior. Unfortunately, many consumers have no or little knowledge of budgeting, financial products, and financial planning. It is therefore important that organizations and market authorities know why consumers spend,...
This Is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon – L. Jon Wertheim & Sam Sommers (2016)
From the publisher: This is Your Brain on Sports is the book for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them. Sports Illustrated executive editor and bestselling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild ride...
Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World – Steven Quartz & Anette Asp (2016)
From the publisher: If you have ever wondered why SUVs replaced minivans, how one rap song turned the cognac industry upside down, or what gives Levi's jeans their iconic allure, look no further-in Cool, Steven Quartz and Anette Asp finally explain the fascinating science behind unexpected trends and enduring successes. We live in a world...
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception – George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller (2015)
From the publisher: Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help...
Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success – Matthew Syed (2015)
From the publisher: Whether developing a new product, honing a core skill or just trying to get a critical decision right, Black Box Thinkers aren't afraid to face up to mistakes. In fact, Black Box Thinkers see failure as the very best way to learn. Rather than denying their mistakes, blaming others, or attempting to...
Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference – David Halpern (2015)
From the publisher: Every day we make countless decisions, from the small, mundane things to tackling life’s big questions, but we don’t always make the right choices. Behavioural scientist Dr David Halpern heads up Number 10’s ‘Nudge Unit’, the world’s first government institution that uses behavioural economics to examine and influence human behaviour, to ‘nudge’...
Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking – Richard Nisbett (2015)
From the publisher: Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behaviour and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research, Richard Nisbett presents...
The Biased Mind: How Evolution Shaped our Psychology Including Anecdotes and Tips for Making Sound Decisions – Jerome Boutang & Michel De Lara (2015)
From the publisher: Using a wealth of anecdotes, data from academic literature, and original research, this very accessible little book highlights how we all struggle to cope with the maelstrom of choices, influences and experiences that come our way. The authors have slogged through piles of dry research papers to provide many wonderful nuggets of...
Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions – Gerd Gigerenzer (2015)
From the publisher: A fascinating, practical guide to making better decisions with our money, health and personal lives from Gerd Gigerenzer, the author of Reckoning with Risk. Numbers don't lie - but they often mislead us. From health risks to financial decisions, we often find it hard to make decisions because the statistics have been...
Behavioral Marketing: Delivering Personalized Experiences at Scale – Dave Walters (2015)
From the publisher: Behavioral Marketing guides you in using relatively new marketing tactics to grow revenue and create process efficiencies. An incredibly valuable text, this book defines the key principles of behavioral marketing including customer journey mapping, channel–level planning, data capture and hygiene, campaign creation, delivery best practices, and measurement/optimization and shows you how to...
Behavioral Economics and Public Health – Christina Roberto & Ichiro Kawachi (2015)
From the publisher: Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices?...
Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles – Dan Ariely (2015)
From the publisher: Three-time New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely teams up with legendary The New Yorker cartoonist William Haefeli to present an expanded, illustrated collection of his immensely popular Wall Street Journal advice column, “Ask Ariely”. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely revolutionized the way we think about ourselves, our minds, and our actions in his books Predictably Irrational, The Upside...
Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice – Cass R. Sunstein (2015)
From the publisher: Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood...
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics – Richard Thaler (2015)
From the publisher: Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics...
Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives – Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir (2014)
From the publisher: In this provocative book based on cutting-edge research, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that scarcity creates a distinct psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail...
Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think – Paul Dolan (2014)
From the publisher: This is not just another happiness book. In Happiness by Design, happiness and behavior expert Paul Dolan combines the latest insights from economics and psychology to illustrate that in order to be happy we must behave happy Our happiness is experiences of both pleasure and purpose over time and it depends on what...
The Behavior Change Wheel: A Guide To Designing Interventions – Susan Michie, Lou Atkins & Robert West (2014)
From the publisher: This is a practical guide to designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions and policies. It is based on the Behaviour Change Wheel, a synthesis of 19 behaviour change frameworks that draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches. The guide is for policy makers, practitioners, intervention designers and researchers and introduces...
The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life – Uri Gneezy & John List (2013)
From the publisher: Can economics be passionate?… Can it center on people and what really matters to them day-in and day-out.… And help us understand their hidden motives for why they do what they do in everyday life? Uri Gneezy and John List are revolutionaries. Their ideas and methods for revealing what really works in...
The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves – Dan Ariely (2012)
From the publisher: Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and the New York Times bestselling author of The Upside of Irrationality and Predictably Irrational, examines the contradictory forces that drive us to cheat and keep us honest, in this groundbreaking look at the way we behave: The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. From ticket-fixing in our police departments to test-score scandals in our schools,...
Willpower: Why Self-Control is the Secret of Success – Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney (2011)
From the publisher: Pioneering research psychologist Roy F. Baumeister collaborates with New York Times science writer John Tierney to revolutionize our understanding of the most coveted human virtue: self-control. Drawing on cutting-edge research and the wisdom of real-life experts, Willpower shares lessons on how to focus our strength, resist temptation, and redirect our lives. It shows readers how to...
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Charles Duhigg (2011)
From the publisher: In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to sidelines of the NFL to...
Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman (2011)
From the publisher: In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more...
Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer – Duncan J. Watts (2011)
From the publisher: Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO’s impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard? If...
The Art of Choosing – Sheena Iyengar (2010)
From the publisher: Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes...
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard – Chip Heath & Dan Heath (2010)
From the publisher: We all know that change is hard. It's unsettling, it's time-consuming, and all too often we give up at the first sign of a setback. But why do we insist on seeing the obstacles rather than the goal? This is the question that bestselling authors Chip and Dan Heath tackle in their...
The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World – Tim Harford (2009)
From the publisher: Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your...
How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer (2009)
From the publisher: The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we “blink” and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind’s black box with the...
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism – George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller (2009)
From the publisher: The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the...
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions – Dan Ariely (2008)
From the publisher: Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup? When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're making...
Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making – Gerd Gigerenzer (2008)
From the publisher: In Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making psychologist and behavioural expert Gerd Gigerenzer reveals the secrets of fast and effective decision-making. A sportsman can catch a ball without calculating its speed or distance. A group of amateurs beat the experts at playing the stock market. A man falls for the...
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness – Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein (2008)
From the publisher: Nudge is about choices—how we make them and how we can make better ones. Drawing on decades of research in the fields of behavioral science and economics, authors Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein offer a new perspective on preventing the countless mistakes we make—ill-advised personal investments, consumption of unhealthy foods, neglect...
Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us – Daniel H. Pink (2008)
From the publisher: Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work,...
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think – Brian Wansink (2006)
From the publisher: In this illuminating and groundbreaking new book, food psychologist Brian Wansink shows why you may not realize how much you’re eating, what you’re eating–or why you’re even eating at all. • Does food with a brand name really taste better? • Do you hate brussels sprouts because your mother did? • Does...
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell (2005)
From the publisher: In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually...
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science – Charles Wheelan (2002)
From the publisher: Finally! A book about economics that won’t put you to sleep. In fact, you won’t be able to put this bestseller down. In our challenging economic climate, this perennial favorite of students and general readers is more than a good read, it’s a necessary investment—with a blessedly sure rate of return. Demystifying...
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2001)
From the publisher: Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. Nassim Nicholas Talebveteran trader, renowned risk expert, polymathic scholar, erudite raconteur, and New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swanhas written a modern classic that turns on its head what we believe...
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything – Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (2001)
From the publisher: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday...
Irrational Exuberance – Robert J. Shiller (2000)
From the publisher: As Robert Shiller’s new 2009 preface to his prescient classic on behavioral economics and market volatility asserts, the irrational exuberance of the stock and housing markets “has been ended by an economic crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” As we all, ordinary Americans and professional...
Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics – Gary Belsky & Thomas Gilovich (1999)
From the publisher: A fascinating and practical manual: Looking at the ways we spend, save, borrow, invest, and waste money, Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich reveal the psychology underlying irrational financial behavior. Entertaining case studies illustrate common patterns of thinking and show readers how changing their habits can protect and grow their assets. New information...
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping – Paco Underhill (1999)
From the publisher: Revolutionary retail guru Paco Underhill is back with a completely revised edition of his classic, witty bestselling book on our ever-evolving consumer culture -- full of fresh observations and important lessons from the cutting edge of retail, which is taking place in the world's emerging markets. New material includes: • The latest...
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert B. Cialdini (1993)
From the publisher: Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say "yes"—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves...