Books like Thinking, Fast and Slow

01

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 Thinking, Fast and Slow.

02

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein · Economics

Nudge is Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's argument that the way choices are presented — the default option, the order of items, the framing of a question — powerfully shapes what people decide, often more than their own stated preferences.

Shares decision-making and behavioral economics with Thinking, Fast and Slow.

03

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Malcolm Gladwell · Psychology

Blink is Malcolm Gladwell's argument that fast, unconscious decisions — the ones made in the first two seconds of encountering something — are often just as reliable as slow, deliberate analysis, and sometimes more so.

Both dig into decision-making.

04

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Science

The Black Swan is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's argument that the most consequential events in history — financial crashes, technological breakthroughs, wars, pandemics — are not predictable outliers but structurally unpredictable ones.

Both dig into cognitive bias.

05

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.

06

The Undoing Project

Michael Lewis · Psychology

Michael Lewis came to this subject sideways.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with Thinking, Fast and Slow.

07

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 Thinking, Fast and Slow.

08

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 Thinking, Fast and Slow.

09

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 Thinking, Fast and Slow.

10

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 Thinking, Fast and Slow.

11

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein · Psychology

Bias gets most of the attention in discussions of judgment error.

Shares cognitive bias and decision-making with Thinking, Fast and Slow.

12

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 Thinking, Fast and Slow.