Social psychology, persuasion and influence

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.

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

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

How 1950s advertisers used psychological research to sway buyers.

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

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.

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

Retail conversion economics observed on the shop floor.

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

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

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

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

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

Gladwell on underdogs and mistaken assumptions about advantage

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

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

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

Cialdini's persuasion research condensed into fifty applied findings

A short case against all lying, white lies included.

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

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

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

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

US subtitle differs

Rene Girard's theory that people imitate each other's desires, applied to business.

How people read others' thoughts and feelings, and how misreading them causes rifts.