Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List 2026
For your intellectual travels this summer, a baker’s dozen of behavioral science books newly published this year.
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How Can We Feel Loved If We Don’t Feel Known?
Many of us tell ourselves “if only” stories about love that seem entirely reasonable at first—stories that fit with what we’ve learned over the years, and that resonate with our hopes, fears, and intuitions. But when we examine these stories more closely, we sometimes find that they don’t hold up.
Announcing Our Summer Book Club and Podcast
Each summer, we read a novel and explore its themes through conversations with leading thinkers at the intersection of science and culture.
What We're Reading
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America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Social Science Report Says About Who We Are
By
Derek Thompson Substack -
American Science at 250
By
Science -
Have People Stopped Trusting Science? The Data Tell a Surprising Story
By
Nature -
VAR: Clear and Obvious Errors
By
The Judgment Gap -
The Thinking Style That Makes People Vulnerable to Extremism
By
Psyche
Featured
The Psychology of the Home Run in 1921
Why was Babe Ruth so good at hitting a baseball? In 1921, a journalist and two psychologists brought the “home run king” into the lab to find out.
What Becomes of Second Chances?
Does erring toward leniency for first-time criminals amount to wisdom or wishful thinking?
Helping Scientists Take Their Research Global: 7 Lessons
The W.E.I.R.D research participant problem persists not because scientists fail to see it as a problem worth solving, but because conducting studies in new, unfamiliar places is difficult. But overcoming this difficulty is doable and essential.
Climate Change Is Getting Worse. Why Don’t We See More Action?
The tech-first mindset to solving climate change rests on three myths about how global social change happens.
The Hard Truths Behavioral Science Must Face in Conflict Settings
Approximately 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas. Yet most of the theories, experiments, and interventions developed in behavioral science are based on stable contexts. It’s time to stop treating conflict as an edge case.
The ‘Busy’ Trap
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it.
‘We Have Never Been Individuals’
How our sense of human exceptionalism fosters a psychological detachment to the natural world that limits our science and diminishes our understanding of ourselves and other species.
‘Looking Backward’ to the Future
When American author Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887 in 1888, he didn’t know that it would be one of the best-selling books of the era; that it would inspire a political groups around the world; or that some of the most prominent intellectuals of the time would count it as an influence on their thinking.
