Books like The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

01

The Laws of Human Nature

Robert Greene · Psychology

Robert Greene is a writer whose career has been built on synthesizing historical biography and social observation into frameworks for understanding power, strategy, and human behavior.

Both dig into power.

02

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson · Psychology

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson wrote this book about the mechanisms by which people protect their sense of themselves as competent, moral, and well-intentioned after they have done something that contradicts that self-image.

A kindred psychology read.

03

The Psychopath Test

Jon Ronson · Psychology

Jon Ronson is a journalist who starts investigating a strange series of anonymous books sent to academics around the world, and ends up spending a year exploring psychopathy, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and the question of whether the diagnostic categories psychiatry uses are tools for understanding people or labels that do damage of their own.

Both dig into power.

04

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert M. Sapolsky · Science

Behave is Robert Sapolsky's attempt to explain why humans do what they do — the violence, the altruism, the tribalism, the heroism — by working through every layer of biology that contributes to a single act.

A kindred psychology read.

05

The Social Animal

Elliot Aronson · Psychology

Elliot Aronson is one of the most influential social psychologists in the history of the field, and The Social Animal, first published in 1972 and now in its twelfth edition, is the textbook introduction to social psychology that has shaped how generations of students think about human behavior.

Both dig into social psychology.

06

Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert B. Cialdini · Psychology

Influence, New and Expanded is the 2021 revision of Robert Cialdini's foundational 1984 work on the psychology of persuasion.

Both dig into social psychology.

07

Obedience to Authority

Stanley Milgram · Psychology

In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram recruited ordinary people off the street and asked them to administer what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks to another person on the orders of an experimenter in a lab coat.

Both dig into situational behavior.

08

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt · Psychology

The Righteous Mind is Jonathan Haidt's argument that moral reasoning is not the source of our moral judgments — it's the press secretary for them.

Both dig into moral psychology.

09

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn · History

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, first published in 1980, retells American history from the perspective of those who rarely appear in conventional textbooks: Native Americans, enslaved people, industrial workers, women, immigrants, and dissidents of various kinds.

Both dig into power.

10

Annals of Imperial Rome

Tacitus · History

Tacitus wrote the Annals in the early second century CE as a history of Rome from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero — the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, covering roughly 14 to 68 CE.

Both dig into power.

11

Barbarians at the Gate

Bryan Burrough · Business

Barbarians at the Gate is Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's account of the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, at the time the largest corporate transaction in history.

Both dig into power.

12

Beyond Good and Evil

Friedrich Nietzsche · Philosophy

Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche's assault on the philosophical tradition he had been trained in and had grown to distrust.

Both dig into power.