Welcome to our selection of Notable Books for 2025. Each year, we review hundreds of newly published titles that cover the science of human behavior.
We select books that expand our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world; that deepen our knowledge of the events shaping our lives; that sharpen the way we do behavioral science and design; that help us navigate life more effectively.
As you explore the Notable Books of 2025, we hope you find titles on the topics you care about and delight in something unexpected.
— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief and Heather Graci, Editor
This is our sixth annual selection of Notable Books. You can find previous selections here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.
10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children’s Lives
By Jean M. Twenge
From the back cover: “Parenting today often feels like an uphill battle, with technology invading every corner of our kids’ lives. From the rise of social media addiction to the growing mental health crisis among children and teens, parents are grappling with how they can create a healthy, balanced relationship with technology for their kids. . . . Drawing on her decades as a psychologist studying the impact of technology and mental health and her personal experience as the mother of three teenagers, Twenge offers ten actionable rules for raising independent and well-rounded children.”
Get the book
Abundance
By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
From the back cover: “Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance.”
Get the book
After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
By Dean Spears and Michael Geruso
From the back cover: “Most people on Earth today live in a country where birth rates already are too low to stabilize the population: fewer than two children for every two adults. In After the Spike, economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso sound a wakeup call, explaining why global depopulation is coming, why it matters, and what to do now.”
Get the book
The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
By Sophia Rosenfeld
From the back cover: “Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. . . . The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom.”
Get the book
Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World
By Toby Stuart
From the back cover: “Anointed demonstrates how status cascades through society, creating winners and losers in ways that often have little to do with merit.”
Get the book
The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters
By Christine Webb
From the back cover: “The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence. . . . [Webb] gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves.”
Get the book
The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life
By Rob Dunn
From the back cover: “Nature is red in tooth and claw, but in equal measure, life works together. Cells host even smaller life, wrapped in a web of mutual interdependence. Ants might go to war, but they also tend fungi, aphids, and even trees. And we humans work . . . with yeast, crops, and pets. Ecologists call these beneficial relationships mutualisms. And they might be the most important forces in the evolution of life. We humans often act as though we are all alone, independent from the rest of life. As The Call of the Honeyguide shows, we are not.”
Get the book
Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities
By Nilanjana Dasgupta
From the back cover: “How can ordinary people fight for social justice? Can individual actions change structural inequality? . . . Social psychologist Nilanjana Dasgupta offers a science-driven approach to achieving social change, arguing that small changes to the “wallpaper”—the local cultures around us—are far more effective in producing structural change locally than seeking change through bias awareness training, symbolic acts, or relying solely on good intentions.”
Get the book
Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making
By Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei
From the back cover: “Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei . . . show how the focus on rationality, narrowly understood, fails to fully describe how we think about our decisions, much less help us make better ones. Notably, it overlooks the positive contribution that framing—how we determine what aspects are most important to us—contributes to good decisions. Schwartz and Schuldenfrei argue that our choices should be informed by our individual ‘constellation of virtues,’ allowing for a far richer understanding of the decisions we make and helping us to live more integrated and purposeful lives.”
Get the book
Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices
By Baruch Fischhoff
From the back cover: “Decisions describes the evolution of decision science . . . through its application to challenging personal and public policy decisions, since the inception of the field. Baruch Fischhoff covers all major topics in basic research, including how people create options, determine what matters to them, evaluate their chances of achieving those goals, and engage their emotions. He shows how those processes play out in an exceptionally wide variety of decisions regarding health, safety, the environment, disasters, and national security, among other topics. He also examines how decision-making abilities vary across individuals and across the lifespan, as well as the ethics and politics of how research is conducted and its results are shared and applied.”
Get the book
Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World
By Emma Holten
From the back cover: “Emma Holten traces how economic thinkers—from the Enlightenment onwards—created a value framework that overlooked and neglected ‘women’s work’ and acts of care. She reveals how the economic models that drive political decisions today are just as flawed, giving us unparalleled monetary wealth, but causing deep social harms that are hurting us all.”
Get the book
Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes
By Sunita Sah
From the back cover: “How many times have you wanted to object, disagree, or opt out of something but ended up swallowing your words, shaking your head, and just going along? . . . In a moment when many of us are anxious and unsure what to do—whether we’re confronting injustice on a social scale or facing something closer to home . . . Sunita Sah offers simple strategies to activate your values.”
Get the book
The Doors You Can Open: A New Way to Network, Build Trust, and Use Your Influence to Create a More Inclusive Workplace
By Rosalind Chow
From the back cover: “The way we currently network and engage in mentorship isn’t working. Given the ever-evolving nature of the workplace, transactional networking and company-enforced mentorship programs simply don’t help make our professional relationships more authentic or our workplaces more equitable. What we need instead is sponsorship.
“What’s the difference between mentorship and sponsorship? Mentorship involves helping a mentee change their behavior, while sponsorship involves changing how other people see a protégé. Sponsorship is as important, if not more so, than mentorship in determining who gets ahead, making it a more effective way to promote social equality and inclusion in the workplace.”
Get the book
The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map
By Alex Hutchinson
From the back cover: “More than just a need to get outside, the search for the unknown is a primal urge that has shaped the history of our species and continues to mold our behavior in ways we are only beginning to understand. . . . Alex Hutchinson refutes the myth that, in our fully mapped digital world, the age of exploration is dead. Instead, the itch to discover new things persists in all of us, expressed not just on the slopes of Everest but in the ways we work, play, and live.”
Get the book
The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell—and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose
By Jonas Olofsson
From the back cover: “Our sense of smell guides our lives far more than our screen-heavy, sight-privileged era would suggest. It animates our experience of food and drink, helps us access memories, and strengthens our intimacy with each other. . . . Jonas Olofsson uncovers the sophisticated processes that drive our olfactory system, with profound implications for how we perceive the world around us.”
Get the book
Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter
By Juliet Schor
From the back cover: “Juliet Schor . . . shares her pioneering analysis of the benefits of a shorter work week, how companies can achieve them, why the concept has taken so long to emerge and gain acceptance, and why doing so will help a company’s employees and its bottom line. The book is a blueprint for implementing a change that once seemed radical, but is now within reach.”
Read an excerpt from Four Days a Week on Behavioral Scientist: “The rapid development of digital technology and AI, and the efficiency gains that come with it, is an opportunity to reverse that trend. But will it? There are powerful structural factors operating to keep hours high. We saw this in the Industrial Revolution. Those technological breakthroughs led to longer, not shorter, hours of work. In recent decades, digitization has transformed work in many occupations and industries, but in the U.S. hours haven’t fallen.”
Get the book
The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing
By Mary-Frances O’Connor
From the back cover: “Coping with death and grief is one of the most painful human experiences. While we can speak to the psychological and emotional ramifications of loss and sorrow, we often overlook its impact on our physical bodies. . . . As she did in The Grieving Brain, O’Connor combines illuminating studies and personal stories to explore the toll loss takes on our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems and the larger implications for our long-term well-being..”
Get the book
Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours
By Corinne Low
From the back cover: “For women in America today, the promise of ‘having it all’ is an ever-elusive carrot. Faced with unsustainable demands in every sphere, we are certainly doing it all—but at a steep cost. . . . In Having It All, Wharton professor and economist Dr. Corinne Low unpacks the hidden factors that influence women’s decision-making, and how the unintended consequences of these choices alter the course of our lives. From when and whether to get married and (or) have children to what type of career to pursue, whether to obtain an advanced degree to where to live.”
Get the book
How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past
By Steve Ramirez
From the back cover: “In How to Change a Memory, Ramirez explores how scientists discovered that memories are fluid—they change over time, can be erased, reactivated, and even falsely implanted in the lab. Reflecting on his own path as a scientist, he examines how memory manipulation shapes our imagination and sense of self. If we can erase a deeply traumatic memory, would it change who we are? And what would that change mean anyway? Throughout, Ramirez carefully considers the ethics of artificially controlling memory, exploring how we might use this tool responsibly—for both personal healing and the greater good.”
Get the book
How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty
By Elizabeth Weingarten
From the back cover: “What if our questions—the ones we ask about relationships, work, meaning, identity, and purpose—are not our tormentors, but our teachers? Inspired by 150-year-old advice from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and backed by contemporary science, Elizabeth Weingarten offers a fresh approach for dealing with these seemingly unsolvable questions. In her quest, Weingarten shares her own journey and the stories of many others, whose lives have transformed through a different, and better, relationship with uncertainty.”
Read an excerpt from How to Fall in Love with Questions on Behavioral Scientist: “[Curiosity] is complex, mutating, unpredictable, and transformational. It is, fundamentally, an act of connection, an act of creating relationships between ideas and people. Asking questions then, becoming curious, is not just about wanting to find the answer—it is also about our need to connect, with ourselves, with others, with the world.”
Get the book
The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives
By Michael Hallsworth
From the back cover: “In our increasingly distrusting and polarized nations, accusations of hypocrisy are everywhere. But the strange truth is that our attempts to stamp out hypocrisy often backfire, creating what Michael Hallsworth calls The Hypocrisy Trap. . . . He shows how our relentless drive to expose inconsistency between words and deeds can actually breed more hypocrisy or, worse, cynicism that corrodes democracy itself.”
Read an excerpt from The Hypocrisy Trap on Behavioral Scientist: “The function of hypocrisy in politics and life is more complex than we recognize. Indeed, democracy relies on the existence of some hypocrisy. For our politics to function, we must find a balance between letting all hypocrisy slide and trying to eradicate hypocrisy completely.”
Get the book
The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking
By Leor Zmigrod
From the back cover: “The human brain faces a set of dilemmas every day: how to achieve coherence from fragmented sensory inputs and how to attain connection with other people in an increasingly atomized and isolating world. Ideologies offer a shortcut, providing easy answers, scripts to follow, and a sense of shared identity. But ideologies also come at a cost: demanding conformity and suppressing individuality through rigid rules, repetitive rituals, and intolerance. Once ideologies grip our minds, they fundamentally transform the way we think, act, and interact with others, making us less sensitive and adaptable. . . . While some individuals are more susceptible to dogmatic thinking than others, all of us can strive to be more flexible, and Zmigrod ultimately explains how we can keep our minds open in the face of extreme ideologies.”
Get the book
Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal
By Max H. Bazerman
From the back cover: “Bazerman tells the sobering story of how fraud in a published paper about inducing honesty upended countless academic careers, wreaked havoc in organizations that had implemented the idea of ‘signing first,’ and undermined faith in academic research and publication.”
Get the book
Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others
By Adam Galinsky
From the back cover: “Inspiring leaders aren’t born—instead, we can inspire or infuriate in any given moment through our behavior, words, or presence. . . . Galinsky identifies the three . . . archetypes of truly great leaders and explains how each of us can develop these characteristics within ourselves to become more inspiring: Visionaries offer a big-picture, optimistic, and engaging vision of the future; Exemplars are courageous and calm protectors who authentically express their passion while remaining consistent in word and deed; Mentors encourage, empower, and elevate others while challenging them to reach their potential.”
Get the book
The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World
By Robert J. Coplan
From the back cover: “Solitude is part of the human experience. But just like other relationships, your relationship with solitude can be satisfying, intimate, and enhance your well-being, or it can leave you wanting, stuck in a cycle of sadness, anxiety, or anger. . . . Most of us have never thought carefully about how to get the most out of the time we spend by ourselves. . . . How can we unlock the positive power of solitude?”
Get the book
Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life
By Shigehiro Oishi
From the back cover: “What makes for a good life, he asks? Is it the simple, predictable pleasures we call happiness? Or can happiness lead to complacency and regret? Is the answer a deep sense of meaning and purpose? Or can a life of purpose invite narrow or misplaced loyalties? Both happiness and meaning as paths to a good life have decades of scientific research to support them. But in recent years, Oishi has uncovered a third dimension to a good life, psychological richness. A psychologically rich life prioritizes curiosity, exploration, and a variety of experiences.”
Get the book
Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results
By Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi
From the back cover: Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi “offer data-backed, actionable solutions that build fairness into the very fabric of the workplace. Their methods—tested at many organizations, and grounded in data proven to work in the real world—help us make fairer, and simply better, decisions. Using their three-part framework, employees at all levels can embed fairness into their everyday practices.”
Read an excerpt from Make Work Fair on Behavioral Scientist: “Men have never been asked to justify their presence in any position of power. It is only the people not in power today—including women and members of other underestimated groups—who are asked to make the case for why they deserve to be there. This is fundamentally unfair and fundamentally wrong.”
Get the book
Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change
By Olga Khazan
From the back cover: “Is it really possible to change your entire personality in a year? . . . Olga Khazan had been spiraling toward an existential crisis. Though she treasured her loving relationship and her dream job, her neurotic personality often left her snatching dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness. . . In Me, But Better, Olga embarks on an experiment to see whether it’s possible to go from dwelling in dread to ‘radiating joy.’ For one year, Olga reluctantly clicked ‘yes’ on a bucket list of new experiences—from meditation to improv to sailing—that forced her to at least act happy. With a skeptic’s eye, Olga brings you on her journey through the science of personality.”
Read an excerpt from Me, But Better on Behavioral Scientist: “That’s the thing about conscientiousness: It’s hard to do it if you don’t already do it. You can wish that you were better organized or more productive and still not have the faintest idea how to get there. Many of us might be sold on the idea of personality change, but conscientiousness exemplifies how difficult it can be in practice: The very behaviors that turn you conscientious require a certain level of conscientiousness to perform.”
Get the book
Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior
By Sandra Matz
From the back cover: “Sandra Matz reveals . . . how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg. Yet big data also holds enormous potential to help us live healthier, happier lives—for example, by improving our mental health, encouraging better financial decisions, or enabling us to break out of our echo chambers.”
Get the book
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
By Rutger Bregman
From the back cover: “A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs. There’s an antidote to this waste of talent, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world’s biggest problems.”
Get the book
My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America
By Ruth Braunstein
From the back cover: “Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against ‘taxpayer funded abortions,’ and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good. Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear.”
Get the book
Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts
By Gregory M. Walton
From the back cover: “The emotional questions we face can define our lives. If you’re expecting an interaction to go wrong, that expectation can make it so. That’s spiraling down. But as . . . Greg Walton shows, when we see these questions clearly, we can answer them well. Known to social psychologists as wise interventions, these shifts in perspective can help us chart new trajectories for our lives. They help us spiral up.”
Read an excerpt from Ordinary Magic on Behavioral Scientist (our most read article of 2025): “Yet if our struggles arise, in part, from the inferences we draw, we have an opportunity. In my work, my colleagues and I identify early moments where people could go one way or the other. By understanding the questions that come up at critical junctures, we can offer people better ways to think through challenges—ways that can help them spiral up, instead of down.”
Get the book
Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
By Kurt Gray
From the back cover: “We all care about protecting ourselves and the vulnerable. Conflict arises, however, when we have different perceptions of harm. We get outraged when we disagree about who the ‘real’ victim is, whether we’re talking about political issues, fights with our in-laws, or arguments on the playground. . . . Gray provides a captivating new explanation for our moral outrage, and unpacks how to best bridge divides. If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question—what harms do they see?”
Get the book
Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality—and Why Men Still Win at Work
By Cordelia Fine
From the back cover: “Cordelia Fine examines . . . why gender inequality is embedded in the workplace and why it has to change. . . . She examines two of the most prominent movements in the corporate world. The Different But Equal viewpoint espouses that women are in the jobs they want despite their lower status and salaries. In the meantime, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has become a slogan that emphasizes productivity and profit, not fair play. Fine shows how both are wrong and the bad effects on everyone when men are still stuck in traditional breadwinner roles and women are having to fight for their due.”
Get the book
The Period Brain: The New Science of Why We PMS and How to Fix It
By Sarah E. Hill
From the back cover: “Sarah E. Hill explains why we feel so universally icky before our periods—and what to do about it. The problem isn’t that women are hormonal; the problem is that the second half of the menstrual cycle—the luteal phase, when the hormone progesterone rises and estrogen decreases—has been systematically ignored by science and medicine. . . . Because the luteal phase is understudied, every bit of health, diet, and relationship advice you’ve followed is based on that first, estrogen-glow half of the month or, worse, was designed for men.”
Get the book
Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working
By Dan Heath
From the back cover: “Changing how we work can feel overwhelming. Like trying to budge an enormous boulder. We’re stifled by the gravity of the way we’ve always done things. And we spend so much time fighting fires—and fighting colleagues—that we lack the energy to shift direction. But with the right strategy, we can move the boulder. In Reset, Heath explores a framework for getting unstuck and making the changes that matter. The secret is to find ‘leverage points’: places where a little bit of effort can yield a disproportionate return. Then, we can thoughtfully rearrange our resources to push on those points.”
Read an excerpt from Reset on Behavioral Scientist: “You don’t want to fall into the. . . trap of relentlessly chasing a goal and triumphantly moving the numbers only to discover (whoops) that it was all misdirected energy. One simple way to avoid that misalignment—a goal that’s inconsistent with the real mission—is to ask a simple but powerful question: What’s the goal of the goal?”
Get the book
The Science of Racism: Everything You Need to Know but Probably Don’t―Yet
By Keon West
From the back cover: “Studies and surveys show, time and again, that about 50 percent of people believe that racism is no longer an issue today. The other half would disagree—vehemently. And much of the writing on the subject of race and racism is equally divisive, in large part because so much of it is based on opinion and personal experience. It’s not grounded in empiricism. It’s not science. In The Science of Racism, social psychologist Keon West corrects that idea, moving this urgent conversation beyond anecdote and polemic in search of conclusive answers and solutions.”
Get the book
Shift: Managing Your Emotions–So They Don’t Manage You
By Ethan Kross
From the back cover: “Whether it’s anxiety about going to the doctor, boiling rage when we’re stuck in traffic, or devastation after a painful break-up, our lives are filled with situations that send us spiraling. But as difficult as our emotions can be, they are also a superpower. Far from being ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ emotions are information. When they’re activated in the right ways and at the right time, they function like an immune system, alerting us to our surroundings, telling us how to react to a situation, and helping us make the right choices. . . . In Shift, [Ethan Kross] dispels common myths . . . and provides a new framework for shifting our emotions so they don’t take over our lives.”
Read an excerpt from Shift on Behavioral Scientist: “As my wife and I hauled lawn chairs toward the soccer field, I thought about what a difference those four minutes and eleven seconds of Journey might have made for [my daughter] that day. It was such a small thing: a song on the car radio. But it had completely reshaped her emotional state, perhaps the type of game she was about to have, and even, in the future, her memories of this day.”
Get the book
The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us
By Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall
From the back cover: “Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall establish a new way to think about our relational life: as existing within “social biomes”—complex ecosystems of moments of interaction with others. Each interaction we have, no matter how unimportant or mundane it might seem, is a building block of our identities and beliefs. Consequently, the choices we make about how we interact and who we interact with—and whether we interact at all—matter more than we might know. Merolla and Hall offer a sympathetic, practical guide to our vital yet complicated social lives and propose realistic ways to embrace and enhance connection and hope.”
Get the book
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
By Nicholas Carr
From the back cover: “As Carr shows how tech companies and their tools of connection have failed us, he forces us to confront inconvenient truths about our own nature. The human psyche, it turns out, is profoundly ill-suited to the ‘superbloom’ of information that technology has unleashed. . . . Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation. It may be too late to change the system, Carr counsels, but it’s not too late to change ourselves.”
Read an excerpt from Superbloom on Behavioral Scientist: “History and psychology both suggest that, in politics as in art, generative AI will succeed in fulfilling the highest aspiration of its creators: to make the virtual feel more authentic than the real.”
Get the book
Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
By Alison Wood Brooks
From the back cover: “All of us can struggle with difficult conversations, but we’re often not very good at the easy ones either. Though we do it all the time, Harvard professor Alison Wood Brooks argues that conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks, rife with possibilities for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. And yet conversations can also be a source of great joy. . . . Drawing on the new science of conversation, Brooks distills lessons that show how we can better understand, learn from, and delight each other.”
Get the book
There’s Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work
By Nelson P. Repenning and Donald C. Kieffer
From the back cover: “The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole. The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important. There has to be a better way. And there is: the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design. . . . It has been used in organizations around the world to close the gap between results promised and results delivered.”
Read an excerpt from There’s Got to Be a Better Way on Behavioral Scientist: “No one would ever ask a cardiac surgeon to stop an operation midstream because something supposedly more important popped up—we know this is a bad idea—yet we ask knowledge workers to do something similar multiple times a day because the immediate impact doesn’t seem onerous.”
Get the book
A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality
By Daniel Yon
From the back cover: “How does your brain decide what it’s seeing, from the physical world to other people? For decades, scientists have tried to understand how our brains work, not realizing that the answer lies much closer to home. New research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the brain is doing the same thing that the scientists are: using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live in.”
Get the book
The Unbuilt Bench: Experimental Psychology on the Verge of Science
By David Peterson
From the back cover: “Psychological experts are omnipresent across public and private spheres. Nonetheless, psychology has always been dogged by questions about its authority and validity. . . . In The Unbuilt Bench, David Peterson argues that the scientific study of the mind and human behavior is a different sort of epistemic activity than the work of the natural sciences. Through fieldwork in ten experimental psychology laboratories and, as a comparison, a molecular biology lab, he explores the concrete practices of experimentation.
“Ongoing improvement of research practice and technology at the frontiers of data collection, a process Peterson calls ‘bench-building,’ is essential to most sciences, since it opens new possibilities for experimentation. Psychology labs, however, largely lack an emphasis on bench-building. Instead, the discipline and its subfields gravitate toward different dimensions of scientific progress that focus on theory building and cultivation of outside audiences.”
Get the book
Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence
By Jens Ludwig
From the back cover: “Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don’t, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe. . . . Progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.”
Get the book
What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change
By Emily Falk
From the back cover: “With so many competing priorities pulling us in different directions every day–family, friends, work, our health—it can feel difficult to make decisions that are aligned with what we care about most. . . . Falk introduces readers to a new paradigm for understanding why we, and those around us, do what we do. This is the value calculation: the often-subconscious mechanism by which the brain computes our everyday choices. By learning how it works, Falk shows, we can learn to work more strategically with it—whether we want to embrace new activities and behaviors, connect more meaningfully with others, or become more effective leaders in our organizations and communities.”
Get the book
What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life
By Allison Daminger
From the back cover: “While most accounts of household labor center on how people use their time, Allison Daminger focuses on a less visible and less easily quantifiable aspect of family life. She introduces readers to the concept of cognitive labor—anticipating, researching, deciding, and following up—and shows how women in different-gender couples do most of this critical work. She argues that cognitive labor has less to do with personality traits—for example, she’s type A while he’s laid-back—and more to do with learned skills that men and women deploy in distinct ways. Yet not all couples fall into the personality trap. . . . What’s on Her Mind points to new ways of understanding the interplay between who we are as individuals and the cognitive work we do on behalf of our families.”
Read an excerpt from What’s on Her Mind on Behavioral Scientist: “If I looked solely at their domestic activity, men and women did appear to differ systematically in their capacity for planning, problem-solving, and processing complex informational inputs. The catch is that the same men who struggled to anticipate domestic problems or follow a project through to its end frequently described success in occupations requiring the very same skills they were said to lack at home.”
Get the book
What’s Real about Race? Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society
By Rina Bliss
From the back cover: “Bliss traces the history of race, revealing how unscientific categories of identity—White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native—became the modern standard, and illuminates how the myth of biological races endures in science and society, warping our understanding of complex topics like intelligence, disease susceptibility, and behavior.”
Get the book
When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
By Steven Pinker
From the back cover: Steven Pinker “explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. . . . This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or ‘out there,’ is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives. . . Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date.”
Read an excerpt from When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . on Behavioral Scientist: “As preposterous as it may seem that I could know that you know that I know that you know something, we appear to be equipped with cognitive processes that strive to do just that. We think about thoughts about thoughts, at least to some number of turtles. Most commonly, we recognize that if something is self-evident, or even salient to us, it’s likely to seem so to others. . . . The fruits of this thinking drive a vast range of human affairs, including elections, game shows, economic bubbles, and, as we’ve seen, when and how we help.”
Get the book
The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now
By Richard H. Thaler and Alex Imas
From the back cover: “Over thirty years ago, Richard H. Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics in his seminal Anomalies column, written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These provocative articles challenged the fundamental idea at the heart of economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers, and provided the foundation for what became behavioral economics. That was then. Now, three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex O. Imas to write a new book. . . . Each chapter starts with an original Anomaly, retaining the spirit of its time stamp. Then, shifting to the present, the authors provide updates to each, asking how the original findings have held up and how the field has evolved since then.”
Read our conversation with the author on Behavioral Scientist: “In my view, behavioral economics is more relevant now than it was 30 years ago. Even though the promise of tech was that it would be less relevant, we have seen the opposite. It could be true that in 30 years, tech and AI will have led to more inequality and more exploitation of biases. . . . That’s a situation that we could end up in, and it’s really up to us where we go.”
Get the book
When you purchase a book using a link, we’ll receive a small commission that helps us sustain our nonprofit mission.
Disclosure: Evan Nesterak and Heather Graci served as editorial consultants on Dan Heath’s Reset. Evan served as an editorial consultant on Ethan Kross’s Shift. Evan served as an early reader and peer-reviewer for MIT Press for The Hypocrisy Trap. Michael Hallsworth is a member of the BIT which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine. Richard Thaler and Barry Schwartz are members of the Behavioral Scientist‘s advisory board. Advisors do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
