Best Psychology Books

Johann Hari investigates the global attention crisis — why it's harder to focus than ever — and interviews scientists to identify both the causes and possible solutions.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg investigates the science of extraordinary communicators, discovering a framework of conversation types and the skills that allow people to genuinely connect across difference.

Daniel Pink argues that we are all in sales now — persuading, convincing, and moving others is a universal human activity, not just a profession — and explains the new science behind doing it well.

Daniel Pink synthesizes research from biology, economics, and psychology to explain when to make decisions, take breaks, and start projects for optimal performance.

Malcolm Gladwell argues that what we consider disadvantages — dyslexia, class backgrounds, weak institutions — can become hidden sources of strength in the right circumstances.

Adam Grant challenges the talent-worship culture and argues that character skills, not innate ability, are the true engines of extraordinary achievement.

A distillation of three thousand years of history's most effective strategies for acquiring and maintaining power, drawn from historical figures ranging from Sun Tzu to Catherine the Great.

A darkly twisting psychological thriller in which a struggling writer discovers a disturbing manuscript hidden in the home of a bestselling author.

A sequel to The Tipping Point that revisits the science of social epidemics twenty-five years later, exploring how the mechanisms of contagion have become darker and more destructive.

Malcolm Gladwell examines how our faulty assumptions about strangers — particularly our default to truth and our coupling of behavior to context — lead to systematic errors with devastating consequences.

A collection of Malcolm Gladwell's best New Yorker essays exploring the hidden side of everyday phenomena, from dog training to hair dye to the Challenger disaster.

Raskolnikov, a destitute former student in St. Petersburg, murders a pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary people are above conventional morality — and then spends the rest of the novel being destroyed by his own conscience. Dostoevsky's most accessible masterpiece is the definitive novel about guilt.

Dr Henry Jekyll creates a potion that separates his respectable self from his darker impulses, releasing Mr Edward Hyde into Victorian London. Stevenson's short novella is both a gripping horror story and one of the most psychologically acute fables about the duality of human nature ever written.

Haidt examines ten great ideas about happiness drawn from ancient philosophy and religion, testing each against modern psychology research to determine what the ancients got right, what they got wrong, and what the science adds.

Byron Katie presents The Work — a four-question inquiry method that dismantles stressful thoughts and reveals the peace that remains when we stop arguing with reality.

Haidt and Lukianoff argue that three 'great untruths' — that fragility is real, that emotional reasoning is reliable, and that society is a battle between good and evil — have taken hold on university campuses, harming students and undermining the goals of liberal education.

The Heath brothers identify the four villains of good decision-making — narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence — and offer a four-step WRAP process for systematically overcoming them.

Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David presents a framework for moving through difficult emotions with flexibility, clarity, and self-compassion rather than suppression or rumination.

Cialdini's follow-up to Influence reveals that the most powerful moment in persuasion is the moment before the message — what you direct attention to immediately before a request shapes what people are receptive to.

Gay Hendricks identifies the hidden self-sabotage patterns that cap our success and happiness, and offers a practical path to living and working in our Zone of Genius.

Coyle investigates what makes the world's best groups — the Navy SEALs, Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, the US Women's Volleyball team — tick. The answer is culture: three specific skills that successful groups share and that anyone can learn to build.

Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who has taken a teaching position on a remote Greek island, becomes entangled in the elaborate psychological games of Maurice Conchis, a wealthy and enigmatic recluse who stages increasingly disturbing theatrical scenarios — blurring the line between performance and reality.

Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal distills the science of self-control from her popular Stanford course, presenting research-based strategies for strengthening willpower and understanding why it fails.

Cialdini and co-authors Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin present fifty research-backed techniques for ethical persuasion, drawn from behavioral science and organized for immediate practical application.