81 books like Design for Cognitive Bias

 In story after story Mark shares that the key to connecting with people is to be “More Interested Than Interesting.” 

The author shares a multitude of thoughtful questions, that you will certainly want to begin to employ to communicate your interest in others. And of course, the reason I love Just Listen is that no one will ever become great at “Leading with Questions” without becoming a great listener!

When your family/staff/ friends feel heard, your relational effectiveness will skyrocket! 

Whether you sell products or services, customers don’t really buy either: they buy outcomes. And it’s not enough to understand what people want to accomplish, truly successful businesses deeply understand how customers view their own success, and how to create a path from where they currently are to where they want to be. 

In Badass, Kathy uses her unique and very visual learning style to help you get in the head of your customers and understand the world from their point of view. There’s a shortlist of people who’ve had a huge impact on my career, and Kathy Sierra is at the top of that very shortlist. This book embodies that impact, I consider it required reading.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is how to manage my own fear and excitement. How we react to the world around us is one of the few things we are truly in control of! This is the book that helped me most to shift the way I perceive and react to things, allowing me to live more calmly in my work and my life even in the face of complexity, fear, even success. 

This book is weirdly simple, almost child-like in its cadence, but don’t let the simplicity fool you. I found it valuable to sit with the short parables and examples especially when I’m having an emotional response surrounding a business decision. 

This was the first book based on Buddhist teachings that I ever read and made sense to me in a practical way. The writing style is strange (and the author has a truly bizarre… show more.

This book is not at all what it seems. If you’ve ever struggled with a project or idea, especially as it grows in complexity, the metaphor of the mythical Hydra may have come to mind. In the myths, the Hydra is especially dangerous because every time you cut off one of its heads, two more grow back in its place. 

Kinda like a project or business that seems impossible to finish. 

Unlike most business books that beat you over the head with case studies, this book uses a single short story styled as a fairytale to unlock and teach dozens of valuable business lessons from across dozens of fields of study: psychology, planning, marketing, negotiation, and more. Half of the fun of reading this book is realizing each time the story is teaching you something useful. It’s like a little treasure hunt of business knowledge all on its own!

This book speaks to my soul. Wiest’s writing makes me feel enriched and nurtured as she talks about life and love in a magical, almost poetic way. Full of short and long essays, it’s easy to dip into this book for a grounding reminder, a calming voice, and a warm hug.

I sometimes read it in between my sessions with clients as it is so uplifting, even though it tackles serious subjects. I also adore that this was written when Wiest was a young woman (in her 20s), and it represents the hope and goodness we need in our increasingly hostile world. I feel inspired to be strong and gentle, mentally astute and emotionally awake, assertive and receptive, kind and firm, all at the same time.

This is technically a textbook and isn’t marketed as a book you bring to the beach. But sometimes, it’s more satisfying to have the big ideas on a topic patiently explained to you in an orderly fashion than to try to pick them up from stories and arguments.

This paperback, coauthored by one of my graduate school teachers (Hastie), explains the famous discoveries by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman on biases in human reasoning, which Kahneman presented in his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow (too obvious for me to include on my list). It also explains lesser-known but still fascinating discoveries and has helpful appendices for those of us who forget some of the basics of probability theory.

Authored by a former philosophy lecturer, this novel was inspired as much by the works of H. P. Lovecraft as J. R. R. Tolkien. It follows a warrior monk named Anasûrimbor Kellhus as he attempts to seize control of a fermenting holy war in order to find his lost father.

Metaphysics plays a key role in the text and subtext of this story. Unlike the traditional fantasy hero, the main weapon Kellhus wields to complete his quest is not his sword but his mind: he is able to judge the cognitive biases of everyone he meets and then subtly shift their minds through rhetoric to suit his purpose.

Through his cold, clinical perspective, we come to understand the invisible threads between cause and effect that make up the world and how these threads can be intentionally resown into a new reality.

This book deepened my understanding of cognitive biases, complementing what I learned by reading the prior recommendation and giving me more insight into how they can contribute to bad decisions. I realized even more deeply how important it is to think carefully and critically when facing complex problems.

I came away from reading this book trying to do a better job of stepping back, challenging my assumptions, and not acting on my first impressions. It contributed to the work I was doing on structured team problem-solving. It also helped me to help the leaders I work with to understand that their intuition often isn’t based on solid thinking.

I’m a writing mentor and coach, and this book has helped so many of my novelists understand and implement dramatic story structure. If you are trying to write fiction, screenplays, or memoir, and you haven’t read this, prepare to have your mind blown open. I have one word for you: misbelief. Go read the book and you’ll soon understand why it’s a game-changer. Note: Lisa doesn’t mention memoir but when I interviewed her on my podcast, she assured me the concepts work beautifully and have been successfully applied. 

The author explains the importance of abstraction in logic, demonstrating its three main components: paths made of long chains of logic, packages made of a collection of concepts structured into a new compound unit, and pivots to build bridges to previously disconnected places.

Eugenia Cheng does an excellent job of abstracting principles of logic to better understand challenging real-world societal issues such as affirmative action and cancer screening. I found it quite compelling to understand how and why she came to her positions on various issues, through her axiom that "avoiding false negatives is more important than avoiding false positives." I appreciated the expertise by which she weaved numerous hard topics, in both mathematics and social justice, into a coherent and compelling narrative.