Psychology

Cialdini's book catalogues six principles of influence — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity — and illustrates each with research and specific cases. The book has become the canonical refer…

Norman correcting Norman. After a career building the case that usability is paramount, he wrote this book to argue that usability is not enough — that people's emotional responses to design operate at three distinct lev…

Duhigg's popular account of how habits work — the cue-routine-reward loop — and how organisations as well as individuals build and break them. The book is journalism at its clearest, built from specific cases (Alcoa unde…

Kidd and Castano's experiments show that reading literary fiction — as distinct from popular fiction or nonfiction — measurably improves theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to others. The finding was p…

Lewis's book is a popular treatment of the psychology of impulsive behaviour — why we make purchases we did not plan, choose options we will regret, click on things we did not mean to click on. The research it summarises…

Henrich argues that "WEIRD" populations — Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic — are cognitively and psychologically unusual compared to the rest of human history and most of the contemporary world, and th…