Books like The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain

01

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman · Psychology

Thinking, Fast and Slow is Daniel Kahneman's account of the two cognitive systems that govern human thought.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

02

Predictably Irrational

Dan Ariely · Psychology

Predictably Irrational is Dan Ariely's examination of how humans make decisions that are consistently, systematically irrational — not random or arbitrary, but irrational in ways that follow patterns.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

03

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert · Psychology

Daniel Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist whose central finding, after decades of studying affective forecasting, is that humans are systematically wrong about what will make them happy.

Both dig into cognitive bias.

04

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Rolf Dobelli · Psychology

Rolf Dobelli is a Swiss entrepreneur and novelist who wrote a series of short newspaper columns on cognitive biases, later collected and expanded into this book.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

05

You Are Not So Smart

David McRaney · Psychology

David McRaney is a journalist who started a blog called "You Are Not So Smart" about self-delusion in 2009, and turned it into this book in 2011.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

06

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Antonio Damasio · Psychology

Antonio Damasio is a neurologist at USC whose work challenges the centuries-old idea that reason and emotion are separate faculties, with reason the reliable guide and emotion the unreliable interference.

Shares decision-making and neuroscience with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

07

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Psychology

Fooled by Randomness is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument that humans are wired to misread luck as skill, noise as signal, and random outcomes as the product of ability or effort.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

08

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

David Eagleman · Psychology

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford who argues that the conscious self is a late, small, and largely uninformed participant in the brain's activity.

Shares decision-making and neuroscience with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

09

Irrationality

Stuart Sutherland · Psychology

Irrationality is Stuart Sutherland's rigorous and often mordant survey of the ways human beings consistently fail to reason well.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

10

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky · Psychology

Judgment Under Uncertainty is the academic anthology that launched a research program.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

11

Mind Over Money

Claudia Hammond · Psychology

Mind Over Money is Claudia Hammond's survey of the research on how people actually think about, feel about, and make decisions with money — which turns out to be considerably less rational than economic theory assumes.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.

12

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler · Psychology

Richard Thaler is one of the founders of behavioral economics, the field that took the anomalies in standard economic theory seriously rather than dismissing them as noise.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.