Psychology and Behaviour

Crowd manias from the Mississippi scheme and South Sea Bubble to witch trials.

How individuals lose judgement in a crowd and how leaders sway crowds.

Why mass movements of every kind draw the same frustrated people and use one method.

How the wish for agreement in close groups led to fiascos like the Bay of Pigs.

Flow, the state of full absorption in a hard task, and how to find it more often.

Papers on how people choose under risk, from prospect theory to framing.

A 20-year test of 28,000 expert forecasts: foxes with many models beat hedgehogs.

Speeches making the case for a latticework of mental models from many fields.

How slot machines are designed to keep gamblers playing longer.

Where you direct attention just before a message shapes how it is received.

Explains an action by tracing its causes back from neurons to hormones to evolution.

Techniques for handling people, being liked and winning others to your view.

How 1950s advertisers used psychological research to sway buyers.

Performing under pressure by quieting the self-interference that spoils play.

What organisational culture is, how it forms, and how it bears on leadership.

Sex evolved as a defence against parasites, and that shapes human mating.

Language as a human instinct, and what science knows of grammar and learning.

Evolutionary psychology explained through Darwin's own life and behaviour.

Chronic stress and how it affects the quality of decisions.

Preference falsification: why people hide their views and how that hides change.

Forty-eight rules for gaining and keeping power, each shown by historical episodes.

Why parents have less effect on how children turn out than people assume.

A step-by-step approach to business negotiation from Wharton's negotiation workshop.

Data showing that low-expectation stocks beat popular ones over the long run.

Retail conversion economics observed on the shop floor.

Seducer types, victim types and a step-by-step process of attraction from history.

Seven everyday ways memory fails, from fading over time to blocking a known name.

How genes and experience interact, each shaping how the other acts.

Beyond a point, more options make people less likely to choose and less satisfied.

People who think ability grows with effort learn more than those who think it fixed.

Economics for daily life: motivating people, choosing food, giving to charity.

Experiments showing that people depart from rational choice in repeatable ways.

Rewards work for routine tasks; creative work runs on autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Lessons on fearlessness drawn from the life of the rapper 50 Cent.

People have no fixed sense of value, so context and anchors set the prices they pay.

Evidence that violence of nearly every kind has declined over history, and why.

How masters from Leonardo to Faraday found a life's task and served apprenticeships.

Experiments showing most cheating is many people cheating a little.

The habit loop of cue, routine and reward, and how to change a habit by its routine.

Most decisions improve if you wait until the last responsible moment.

Givers, takers and matchers, and why givers end up both at the bottom and the top.

People can't act randomly, and how to exploit that in games, tests and markets.

How behavioural economics was built against economists who assumed rational agents.

How people champion new ideas, and how leaders can encourage originality.

Experiments showing people work for meaning and recognition, not just money.

Building resilience after loss, starting from the sudden death of a husband.

Eighteen patterns of human behaviour, from irrationality on, and how to handle them.

Early specialisation works only where rules are stable; elsewhere breadth wins.

Lessons from 25 years of interviews with investors from Templeton to Munger.

Rethinking your beliefs is a skill apart from intelligence, and how to practise it.

How poker players, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists think about risk.

Common knowledge, where everyone knows that everyone knows, and what it does.

Why money is hard to think about, and the errors people make in spending.

How the internet can spread generosity and make giving a force for good.

Thirty-three strategies of conflict drawn from Napoleon, Hannibal, Thatcher and more.

How genes and experience interact, each shaping how the other acts.

366 daily lessons on power, seduction, mastery, strategy and human nature.

Essays on reading crowd opinion as a signal to think the opposite.

How biases such as anchoring and the winner's curse distort bargaining.

The economics of positional goods and status competition.

Behavioural finance for practitioners: mental shortcuts, framing and market errors.

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.

Builds out Munger's latticework idea from primary sources.

Practical countermeasures rather than a catalogue of biases.

How complex systems, from subprime lending to space shuttles, drift into failure.

Why humans tell stories: a rehearsal for life's social problems.

Traits of psychopathy and where they are rewarded in business

Bevelin distilling observation and inference habits from Sherlock Holmes

Gladwell on underdogs and mistaken assumptions about advantage

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.

The Good Judgment Project; the practices that measurably improve forecasts.

Dialogue form; Munger's inversion habit worked through systematically.

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.

Reason evolved to justify ourselves and persuade others, not to think alone.

Behavioural genetics on how much of an outcome is inherited

Why complex systems fail, from Volkswagen to Everest, and how to design against it.

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.

Kahneman died 27 March 2024; this was his last book.

Experiments from psychology showing the systematic errors in how people reason.

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.

Sketches of the gap between what people know to do with money and what they do.

One mental bias per chapter, the research behind it and how people fall for it.

A memoir of surviving Auschwitz and a psychologist's guide to healing from trauma.

A psychologist's study of modern people's spiritual search.

Thirteen principles of getting rich, claimed to come from studying 500 wealthy men.

The size of your thinking sets the size of your results, and how to think bigger.

Creativity in humour, science and art as 'bisociation': joining two unrelated frames.

Life in Nazi concentration camps, and logotherapy: finding meaning to survive.

How people and cultures react to death, and what that reaction does to them.

Cognitive psychology applied to how leaders misperceive each other in foreign policy.

The theory that consciousness is learned, arising from a once two-chambered mind.

A neurologist on the varieties of luck in scientific discovery

A 70-question test that sorts readers into 16 temperament types, like Myers-Briggs.

Metaphor as a basic mechanism of thought that shapes how people understand the world.

How sensitive children who meet their parents' needs lose touch with the true self.

Why many successful children and adults feel empty, and how to break the cycle.

Edited volume

Behavioural training methods for animals and people, explained with examples.

Home-study course rather than a trade book.

How acting on routine leads to error and pain, and what thinking mindfully changes.

Change behaviour by changing what you link with pain and pleasure.

Edited volume.

Why some groups of talented people achieve greatness and others never do.

How to spot subtle warning signs of violence and trust the intuition that sees them.

A scale of human consciousness and a claimed method to test any statement's truth.

How firefighters, pilots and other experts decide under time pressure.

Sun Tzu's strategies of war applied to helping women win at love.

Four steps to speak without blame: observations, feelings, needs and requests.

What patients with odd neurological disorders reveal about the brain and the self.

Cognitive therapy applied to the thinking behind anger, hostility and violence.

Edited volume

A journalist learns memory techniques and wins the US Memory Championship.

How ideas and behaviour spread like epidemics, and the three factors that tip them.

Why people mistake luck for skill, above all in markets.

Edited volume.

Why some people survive disasters that kill others in the same circumstances.

How snap judgments work, when to trust them and when they mislead.

Edited volume.

Inside a community of men perfecting seduction techniques, and one man's doubts.

Ancient wisdom on happiness tested against modern psychology and brain research.

The case that disorder is often more efficient than imposed order

Short reflections and practices for starting mindfulness, read at random or daily.

How plate size, brand names and habit make people eat more than they realise.

Essays on investing philosophy, psychology, competition and science.

What a chess prodigy turned tai chi champion learned about learning itself.

How judging firms by their results corrupts most business research and advice.

Neuroscience of investing decisions, written by Graham's modern editor.

Applies behavioural finance to building portfolios for real clients.

What brain science says about learning, sleep, stress, memory and multitasking.

How timing, culture and accumulated advantage explain exceptional success.

Cognitive science and learning theory applied to thinking and learning better.

Deliberate practice, not innate talent, explains world-class performance.

Why people misjudge risk; the availability heuristic in public life

Cialdini's persuasion research condensed into fifty applied findings

Argues that the quality of a life depends on what a person pays attention to.

The 'Upper Limit Problem': how people sabotage themselves when good things happen.

How talent is grown, not born, through a brain mechanism training can tap.

Eight mistakes experienced decision-makers repeat, and a correction for each.

Change made easier: direct the rational rider, motivate the emotional elephant.

Courage, compassion and connection as choices that lead to wholehearted living.

Seven patterns, such as the adjacent possible, in the settings that produce ideas.

How reframing the stories people tell about themselves leads to better lives.

Self-control as a physical capacity, and how to build it, from a Stanford course.

Classifies investors into behavioural types for advice and design.

Research on shame and vulnerability, and why vulnerability comes before connection.

How schools and workplaces built for extroverts waste what introverts offer.

How the unconscious mind shapes perception, judgement and dealings with others.

Why the twenties matter, against the hype that trivialises that decade of life.

How testosterone feeds traders' winning streaks and appetite for risk.

Field-tested tips for improving skills in sport, music, art, maths and business.

Four traps that ruin decisions, such as narrow framing, and a process to beat each.

A short case against all lying, white lies included.

Alfred Adler's psychology taught through five nights of dialogue.

How trauma reshapes the body and brain, and the treatments that help survivors.

How extreme-sports athletes use flow states to push performance further.

Twelve rules for living, each drawn from clinical practice, biology and myth.

Why aviation learns from every failure while fields like medicine hide theirs.

How finding love, dating and relationships have changed from earlier generations.

How to deal with irrational, volatile and manipulative people at work and at home.

Build habits by making them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Attracting women through honest self-development instead of pickup tactics.

How experts in music, chess, medicine and sport excel through deliberate practice.

Productivity as a matter of how people think, set goals, build teams and decide.

An engineer's approach to happiness: the illusions and brain flaws behind suffering.

Chance shapes success more than people think; what that means for fairer economies.

Routines, tools and advice from over 200 podcast guests on health, wealth and wisdom.

How popularity in youth shapes development and still affects happiness and success.

How to design moments that make experiences richer and more memorable.

A grieving man walks the Camino de Santiago after scattering his father's ashes.

An FBI counterintelligence system for earning trust, built from recruiting sources.

The history and revival of psychedelic research, and the author's own trips.

Depression and anxiety traced to lost connections to work, people and values.

The brain science that matters to designers and how it shapes people's daily use.

US subtitle differs

Distraction comes from escaping discomfort, not technology, and how to manage it.

How popular stories spread like epidemics and drive economic events.

How sleep, diet and social media feed ADHD-like traits, with Trump as a case study.