My List of Best Social Psychology Books

As an economics major, a huge fan of behavioral economics, statistics, psychology, and human biology, I naturally got hooked on social psychology books. I love humans; I love how we think, and I love what makes us what we are. This list is compiled of books I would personally recommend to anyone who’s interested in social psychology but doesn’t know where to start. I give Goodreads links instead of Amazon so that you could read a bit more about the book, maybe, find quotes for yourself, or add it to your to-read shelf.

The Basics: How We Think

Social psychology is rooted in biology, anatomy, and neuroscience. Make sure you have at least some basic understanding of how the nervous system operates, what neurons are for, and what we know about the brain. An atlas of human anatomy plus a high-school anatomy textbook should be plenty. If you are more into how stuff we intake affects the brain, there is a course on Coursera for this. It’s called Drugs and the Brain, and it’s definitely worth your time (caution, it’s pretty hard). Otherwise, I would definitely recommend reading:

1. Daniel Kahneman “Thinking: Fast and Slow”. This book lays the foundation of the two systems we use for thinking: the fast, emotional one, and the deliberate, rationalizing brain, and how the two affect each other. It explains the most common cognitive biases. I would recommend beginning with this book if you want to know how we think, and if you, like me, never believed in rational humans in the first place.
2. David Linden “The Compass of Pleasure”. This book is a fascinating explanation of how we become addicted to anything — drugs, sports, food, sex, or doing the good deeds. It dives deep into our pursuit of happiness, our own search for pleasure. This book is not recreational reading — Linden uses some hard science to explain how substances like nicotine or cocaine affect our pleasure circuit. However, I would recommend this book to familiarize yourself with the most famous experiments in neuroscience so far.
3. Sheena Iyengar “The Art of Choosing”. This is another very important book that explains how we make choices, and why more choice is sometimes worse than less choice. The author tries to understand whether how and what we choose is affected by culture, why we make choices that leave us worse-off, and how we can control what we choose. Other books on choice are most likely to be based on studies Iyengar analyzes in her book.
4. Robert Cialdini “Influence”. The foundation of all persuasion principles that we use in marketing. This book offers a deep research of the six persuasion principles, how to use them, and how to protect yourself when someone tries to use them against you. It is full of great examples and the new edition just went out recently.

Decision-making and Rationality

1. Dan Ariely “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty”. As someone on the dark side of education, I was greatly impressed by this book. It gives amazing insights into why people cheat, how they do it, and why in some cases cheating — not the big-time financial-crisis-causing type of cheating but the more mundane one, like stealing pens from your office — seems normal and perfectly rational.
2. Dan Ariely “Predictably Irrational”. They say “question your own decisions”. They say “understand where and why you are wrong”. This book lays the foundation of understanding how our brain operates when making small, even mundane decisions, and how these decisions affect our perception of things.
3. Barry Schwartz “The Paradox of Choice”. Choice is good, right? I mean, they have no choice in North Korea or in Belarus, and look at them. Western culture is obsessed with availability of options. Yet, as this book confirms, having too much choice leads to decision-making paralysis and even depression. Overwhelming abundance of stuff “that looks tasty, that looks plenty” is not always good. This book teaches us to be more content with the choices we make.

Applications of Social Psychology: Management

1. Robert Greene: “The 48 Laws of Power”. A timeless piece. I read it twice, and I still come back to it. The book is applicable in many settings. I would equal it to “The Art of War” when it comes to influencing and leading individuals and groups.
2. Charles Duhigg “The Power of Habit”. This book is applicable to companies and individuals. How do we integrate products into daily lives of our target audiences? How do we make people come back to our websites? How do we make our products — a habit? This book answers all these questions and even more.
3. Susan Cain “Quiet”. I never fully accepted myself as an introvert before I read this book. I treated my need to recharge after calls and public speaking sessions as a weakness. I assumed my need to recharge and stay away from people for hours on end to be a fault of my personality, not an ingrained property.

Applications of Social Psychology: Neuromarketing and Beyond

1. Martin Lindstrom “Brandwashed”. This is the only book I would recommend on neuromarketing. First, because someone who read enough of social psychology studies is perfectly capable of drawing their own conclusions on applications of this science in the practice of marketing. Second, because Lindstrom covers most up to date studies that connect human brain and brands.

Entertaining Social Psychology

1. Malcolm Gladwell “Blink”. Have you ever had those moments when you just knew the answer without dwelling upon the gigabytes of data at hand? Intuition is best defined as the ability of our brain to pull out most relevant facts without extensively emerging ourselves into all the information we have at hand and make decisions seemingly easy. In his book, Gladwell examines intuition and offers valuable insights into how and why we make decisions that seem so easy.
2. Malcolm Gladwell “David and Goliath”. A social-psych version of the “Blue Ocean Strategy”, this book is a collection of stories proving that any disadvantage can become and advantage if you twist it hard enough. Gladwell isn’t exactly a scientist; as a journalist, he presents a great narrative but after a while you can’t really remember his books in great detail.
3. Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point”. An exploration of the avalanche effect in marketing. Gladwell offers great insights into how products become trends, and supplies his insights with examples. I wish he had Pokemon Go in one of those.

Abuse of Social Psychology Principles: Good and Bad

1. Maria Konnikova “The Confidence Game”. Now that you read it all, you think you know it all? Konnikova wrote a great history of scam in various cultures. She offers insights into how exploiting failures in our ability to process and digest information can lead us to really bad decisions. A well-researched book.