Psychology and Behaviour
The mind and behaviour — cognition, bias, emotion, motivation, personality and social psychology — including the popular behavioural-science canon. Read by anyone trying to understand why people, themselves included, act as they do.
564 books
Books 564
Charles Mackay · 1841 · The original catalogue of speculative folly; still cited on every bubble.
Gustave Le Bon · 1895 · The founding study of crowd psychology behind every mania
Eric Hoffer · 1951 · Mass movements and the psychology of the true believer
T1 Groupthink
Irving L. Janis · 1972 · The original study of how cohesive groups suppress dissent
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · 1990 · Optimal experience and attention; the psychology of absorbed work
Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky · with Amos Tversky · 2000 · Edited volume; Open Library lists first publication 1985.
Charlie Munger · 2005 · Edited by Peter Kaufman; expanded Stripe Press edition published 2023.
Andrew WilkinsonCharlie MungerChristopher BloomstranFrancois RochonGuy SpierLi LuMichael MauboussinMohnish PabraiWarren BuffettBill GatesDaniel EkDrew HoustonEric JorgensonJosh WolfeMarc AndreessenMatt MullenwegMichael BatkoNathan MurphyNaval RavikantNiki ScevakPatrick CollisonRamit SethiRyan PetersonSam AltmanShane ParrishTerrance McArthurThe Barefoot InvestorTim Ferriss
Natasha Dow Schüll · 2012 · Slot machine design as engineered time-on-device.
T1 Pre-Suasion
Robert B. Cialdini · 2016 · Cialdini on framing attention before the persuasive message arrives
T1 Behave
Robert M. Sapolsky · 2017 · Biology of human behaviour across timescales, from neurons to culture
Dale Carnegie · 1936 · The original popular manual on persuasion and handling people
Vance Packard · 1957 · Motivational research and the first popular backlash against it.
W. Timothy Gallwey · 1974 · Performance under pressure; the self-interference problem investors recognise
Edgar H. Schein · 1985 · The standard academic model of how culture is formed and changed.
Steven Pinker · 1994 · Language as an evolved instinct; a Munger multidisciplinary reading
Robert Wright · 1994 · Evolutionary psychology as an account of motive and reciprocity
Robert M. Sapolsky · 1994 · Sapolsky on chronic stress and its effect on decision quality
Timur Kuran · 1995 · Preference falsification: why opinion cascades and regimes collapse suddenly
Judith Rich Harris · 1998 · Challenges the evidence that parenting shapes adult outcomes
G. Richard Shell · 1999 · The best research-grounded bridge between theory and the table.
David Dreman · 1999 · Dreman argues low-expectation stocks beat glamour over full cycles.
T2 Why We Buy
Paco Underhill · 1999 · Retail conversion economics observed on the shop floor.
Daniel L. Schacter · 2001 · How memory fails, including the biases that distort recalled evidence
Barry Schwartz · 2004 · Why more options reduce satisfaction and worsen decisions
T2 Mindset
Carol S. Dweck · 2006 · Fixed versus growth mindset; widely used in management and coaching
Dan Ariely · 2008 · Ariely's contribution is showing that our irrationality is not random — it follows predictable patterns that can be mapped and, to some degree, engineered around. His experiments on relativity, free, and social versus market norms each isolate a mechanism that pure psychology literature tends to bury in statistical tables.
T2 Drive
Daniel H. Pink · 2009 · Autonomy, mastery and purpose against pay-for-performance assumptions
T2 Priceless
William Poundstone · 2010 · The psychology of price, anchoring and what people will meter.
Steven Pinker · 2011 · Long-run violence data against the narrative of a worsening world
T2 Mastery
Robert Greene · 2012 · Robert Greene's synthesis of mastery across domains applies directly to the musician's developmental arc: apprenticeship under someone further along, the creative-active phase of experimentation, and the intuitive mastery that eventually emerges. The profiles of Mozart and Coltrane anchor the abstract framework in musical specifics.
Charles Duhigg · 2012 · Habit loops in people and companies; why routines drive repeat purchase
Adam Grant · 2013 · Reciprocity styles, and how givers outperform over long horizons
T2 Hooked
Nir Eyal · 2014 · The habit loop that makes a free product worth monetising.
William Poundstone · 2014
Richard H. Thaler · 2015 · How behavioural economics won the argument, told by the man who ran it.
T2 Range
David Epstein · 2019 · The case for breadth over early specialisation in unpredictable domains
T2 On the Edge
Nate Silver · 2024 · Long treatment of Bankman-Fried and the expected-value culture he ran on.
Steven Pinker · 2025 · Common knowledge as the hidden coordination mechanism in social life
Dan Ariely · Ariely and Kreisler's book on money irrationality covers pain of paying, opportunity cost neglect, and the psychology of credit card spending. It extends Ariely's earlier research into financial contexts specifically, and the experiments here are among the most readable in the genre.
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Humphrey B. Neill · 1954 · The original essay collection on crowd opinion as a signal.
Max H. Bazerman, Margaret A. Neale · 1992 · Cognitive bias applied to bargaining; anchoring and the winner's curse.
T3 Luxury Fever
Robert H. Frank · 1999 · The economics of positional goods and status competition.
Hersh Shefrin · 2000 · The academic bridge between behavioural finance and portfolio practice.
Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson · 2007 · Tavris and Aronson focus on what happens after a bias fires: the self-justification, narrative revision, and escalating commitment that follow. Cognitive dissonance, they argue, is not a personality flaw but a universal mechanism, and understanding it explains police misconduct, political tribalism, and therapy failures in a single framework.
Peter Bevelin · 2007 · Builds out Munger's latticework idea from primary sources.
James Montier · 2010 · Practical countermeasures rather than a catalogue of biases.
Kevin Dutton · 2012 · Traits of psychopathy and where they are rewarded in business
Peter Bevelin · 2013 · Bevelin distilling observation and inference habits from Sherlock Holmes
Malcolm Gladwell · 2013 · Gladwell on underdogs and mistaken assumptions about advantage
Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir · 2013 · Mullainathan and Shafir's research on cognitive bandwidth shows that financial scarcity — not just poverty but any experience of not having enough — tunnels attention in ways that make long-term planning harder and short-term mistakes more likely. It reframes willpower-based explanations of financial failure without excusing the structural causes.
Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner · 2015 · The Good Judgment Project; the practices that measurably improve forecasts.
Peter Bevelin · 2016 · Dialogue form; Munger's inversion habit worked through systematically.
Michael Lewis · 2016 · Michael Lewis's account of the Kahneman-Tversky collaboration works as intellectual biography and as a second path through the research for readers who find academic writing slow. The friendship and its eventual fracture clarifies how two very different minds produced work that neither could have done alone.
T3 Blueprint
Robert Plomin · 2018 · Behavioural genetics on how much of an outcome is inherited
Chris Clearfield, Andras Tilcsik · 2018
Shane Parrish, Rhiannon Beaubien · 2020
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein · with Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein · 2021 · Kahneman died 27 March 2024; this was his last book.
Stuart Sutherland · First published in 1992 and less famous than it deserves to be. Sutherland was a psychologist at Sussex who synthesized experimental evidence from social psychology, cognitive science, and psychiatry into a single readable volume. His treatment of in-group bias, obedience research, and medical decision-making fills gaps that the Kahneman-focused literature tends to leave.
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Claudia Hammond · Klontz and Klontz introduced the concept of money scripts — inherited, often unconscious beliefs about money formed in childhood — and this book is the clearest account of the four script types: money avoidance, money worship, money status, and money vigilance. The clinical case material grounds the theory in ways that purely empirical books don't.
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Carl Richards · Carl Richards, a financial planner, uses simple sketches to map the distance between what people know they should do with money and what they actually do. His treatment of financial decisions as emotional events first and numerical events second is practically useful in a way that academic behavioral finance rarely is.
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Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson · Hanson and Simler make the most provocative claim in this list: that self-deception is not a flaw but an adaptive strategy — we hide our real motives from ourselves so we can more convincingly hide them from others. If true, the entire bias-correction project has a ceiling. This book belongs at the end so it reframes everything before it.
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David McRaney · McRaney's blog turned book is the most self-deprecating entry on the list — each chapter names a bias, explains the research, and shows how the author himself falls for it. The format is reductive but effective for readers who want a broad survey without the weight of the primary sources.
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Viktor E. Frankl · 1968
Frank MartinMohnish PabraiNat EliasonRyan HolidayAlex and BooksAntonio García MartínezBrené BrownBryan JohnsonCodie SanchezDavid Heinemeier HanssonEv WilliamsJames AltucherJason CalacanisJulie StevanjaMaria PopovaNathan MurphyNaval RavikantSahil BloomSam AltmanShane ParrishSimon SinekSteph SmithSuperbook reading listsTerrance McArthurThe Rational WalkTim FerrissTom BilyeuTony Robbins
Swami Rama · 1976
James H. Austin · 1978 · A neurologist on the varieties of luck in scientific discovery
David 86 Keirsey, Marilyn Bates · 1978
M. Scott Peck · 1978
George Lakoff · 1980
Oliver Sacks · 1980
Alice Miller, Ruth Ward · 1981
Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky · with Paul Slovic, Amos Tversky · 1982 · Edited volume; Open Library lists first publication 1981.
Karen Pryor · 1984
Van K. Tharp · 1987 · Home-study course rather than a trade book.
Anthony Robbins · 1991
Antonio R. Damasio · 1994
Jon Kabat-Zinn · 1994
Evelyn McFarlane, James Saywell · 1995
Evelyn McFarlane, James Saywell · 1996
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · 1997
Warren Bennis · 1997
David R. Hawkins · 1998
Evelyn McFarlane, James Saywell · 1999
John Gottman, Nan Silver · 1999
Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, Norbert Schwarz · with Ed Diener, Norbert Schwarz · 1999 · Edited volume; Open Library lists first publication 1998.
Steve Chandler · 2000
Joseph Di Prisco, Michael. Riera · 2000
Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan · 2000
Rebecca Shafir · 2000
Evelyn McFarlane, James Saywell · 2000
Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton · 2001
Daniel Kahneman, Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin · with Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin · 2002 · Edited volume.
Timothy D. Wilson · 2002
Laurence Gonzales · 2003 · Who lives and who dies in extreme situations, and why
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · 2003
Susan Ford Collins · 2003
Gregg Eaterbrook · 2003
Malcolm Gladwell · 2004
Frans Johansson · 2004
Gordon Livingston · 2004
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, David Kessler · 2005
Elkhonon Goldberg · 2005
Eric Abrahamson, David H. Freedman · 2006 · The case that disorder is often more efficient than imposed order
Jason Zweig · 2007 · Neuroscience of investing decisions, written by Graham's modern editor.
Michael M. Pompian · 2008 · Applies behavioural finance to building portfolios for real clients.
Daniel Gardner · 2008 · Why people misjudge risk; the availability heuristic in public life
Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini · 2008 · Cialdini's persuasion research condensed into fifty applied findings
Robert J. Shiller, George A. Akerlof · with George A. Akerlof · 2009
Daniel Coyle · 2009
Michael Mauboussin · 2009
George Anders · 2011
Daniel J. Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson · 2011
Roy F. Baumeister · 2011
James R. Flynn · 2012
Michael M. Pompian · 2012 · Classifies investors into behavioural types for advice and design.
Nancy L. Segal · 2012
Chade-Meng Tan · 2012
John Coates · 2012 · A former trader turned neuroscientist on hormones and risk-taking
Daniel H. Pink · 2012
Mahzarin R. Banaji, Anthony G. Greenwald · 2013
Elizabeth Dunn, Michael Norton · 2013
T4 Relentless
Shari Lesser Wenk, Tim Grover · 2013
Timothy A Pychyl · 2013
Bessel A. van der Kolk · 2014
Steven Kotler · 2014
Robert J. Shiller, George A. Akerlof · with George A. Akerlof · 2015
James Clear · 2016
Ali AbdaalBalaji S. SrinivasanNat EliasonAna FabregaAndrew LokenauthAnthony PomplianoBiz StoneCal NewportCharlie Marie PrangleyGeorge HatzisIman GadzhiJordan HughesJustin KanKeith RaboisMel RobbinsNick HuberPieter LevelsSahil BloomSuperbook reading listsTerrance McArthurThe Rational WalkTim FerrissTrevor NcubeVinod Khosla
Robert H Frank · 2016
Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson · 2018
Rory Sutherland · 2019 · US subtitle differs; Open Library unreachable this run.
Donald Robertson · 2019
Lori Gottlieb · 2019
Malcolm Gladwell · 2019
Morgan Housel · 2020 · Short essays on why behaviour beats analysis in determining outcomes.
William Green · 2021 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Martha Beck · 2021
Rory Sutherland, Pete Dyson · with Pete Dyson · 2021 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Morgan Housel · 2025 · OL lists title as 'The Art Of Spending Money'
Stephanie Rosenbloom
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Bruce Tift
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Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Renee Baron, Elizabeth Wagele Unread
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Robert M. Sapolsky
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Matthieu Ricard
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Peter A. Levin
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Ingrid Fetell Lee
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Step (Perennial Library) by Edward de Bono
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George Leonard
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Michelle Segar
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V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee
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Charlie Munger
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Rodd Wagner
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Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
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Blair Warren
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Julian Jaynes
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V. S. Ramachandran
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Cheryl Strayed
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