Welcome to our selection of Notable Books for 2024. Each year, we review hundreds of newly published titles covering the science of human behavior. Our goal is to select the books that educate and entice us, surprise and delight us, and leave us smarter, wiser, and better informed about ourselves and our world.
This year’s list features 45 books, each published in 2024. You’ll find a flurry of titles on AI, a renewed focus on work and overwork, paths to slower and smarter productivity, books that offer new ways to appreciate probability and chance, and those that provide new perspectives on behavioral design.
Then there are unique titles offering forays into topics you might not expect, including the field of existential psychology, how animals understand death, and plant intelligence.
This year’s list is our fifth annual selection of Notable Books. You can find previous selections here: 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.
— Antonia Violante, Books Editor, and Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief
AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own
By Verity Harding
From the back cover: “Verity Harding draws inspiring lessons from the histories of three twentieth-century tech revolutions—the space race, in vitro fertilization, and the internet—to empower each of us to join the conversation about AI and its possible futures. History points the way to an achievable future in which democratically determined values guide AI to be peaceful in its intent; to embrace limitations; to serve purpose, not profit; and to be firmly rooted in societal trust.”
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference
By Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
From the back cover: “AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will.”
The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
By Nick Romeo
From the back cover: “Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century—widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world—many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe. But a growing number of people . . . are rejecting these myths and reshaping economies around the world to reflect ethical and social values. Romeo takes us on an extraordinary journey through the unforgettable stories and successes of people working to build economies that are more equal, just, and livable.”
Read an excerpt from The Alternative on Behavioral Scientist: “Defining a living wage is a double challenge. There’s the moral and political task of deciding what constitutes living and the empirical question of how much this actually costs in America or around the world . . . What many now call the living wage is better defined as a minimum wage.”
Antiracist by Design: Reimagining Applied Behavioral Science
By Crystal C. Hall and Mindy Hernandez
From the back cover: “Behavioral science has been celebrated as a field whose insights can design a better world, but its color-blind approach has perpetuated unjust systems. Antiracist by Design provides the tools and a roadmap to an antiracist approach to applied behavioral science, including a step-by-step guide to reimagined behavioral design processes.”
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt
From the back cover: “After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. Haidt shows how the ‘play-based childhood’ began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the ‘phone-based childhood’ in the early 2010s. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the ‘collective action problems’ that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free.”
The Atomic Human: What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI
By Neil D. Lawrence
From the back cover: “If artificial intelligence takes over decision-making what, then, is unique and irreplaceable about human intelligence? By contrasting our own intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, The Atomic Human reveals the technical origins, capabilities, and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded–not just by the experts, but ordinary people.”
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
By Ethan Mollick
From the back cover: “In Co-Intelligence, Mollick urges us to engage with AI as co-worker, co-teacher, and coach. He assesses its profound impact on business and education, using dozens of real-time examples of AI in action. Co-Intelligence shows what it means to think and work together with smart machines, and why it’s imperative that we master that skill.”
Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations
By Mary C. Murphy
From the back cover: “Murphy’s original decade-long research reveals that organizations and teams more geared toward growth inspire deeper learning, spark collaboration, spur innovation, and build trust necessary for risk-taking and inclusion. They are also less likely to cheat, cut corners, or steal each other’s ideas. In these cultures, great ideas come from people from all backgrounds and at all levels—not just those anointed as brilliant or talented.”
Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
By Tom Chivers
From the back cover: “At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives . . . A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.”
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
By Kyle Chayka
From the back cover: “Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions arise: What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human?”
Read an adaptation from Filterworld on Behavioral Scientist: “We should talk even more about the things we like, experience them together, and build up our own careful collections of likes and dislikes. Not for the sake of fine-tuning an algorithm, but for our collective satisfaction.”
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
By Brian Klaas
From the back cover: “Social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.”
Read an excerpt from Fluke on Behavioral Scientist: “For one line of bacteria, one tiny change meant that everything about their future changed, all because of a random mutation, made possible by four unrelated accidents.”
Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society
By Daniel Chandler
From the back cover: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like? This is the revolutionary thought experiment proposed by the twentieth century’s greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. As economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler argues . . . it is by rediscovering Rawls that we can find a way out of the escalating crises that are devastating our world today.”
The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder
By Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao
From the back cover: “Every organization is plagued by destructive friction. Yet some forms of friction are incredibly useful, and leaders who attempt to improve workplace efficiency often make things even worse. Drawing from seven years of hands-on research, The Friction Project . . . teaches readers how to become ‘friction fixers.’”
Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide
By Keith Payne
From the back cover: “There has been much written about the impact of polarization on elections, political parties, and policy outcomes. But Keith Payne’s goal is more personal: to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. This book is about how ordinary people think about politics, why talking about it is so hard, and how we can begin to mend the personal bonds that are fraying for so many of us.”
Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
By Jamil Zaki
From the back cover: “Cynicism is an understandable response to a world full of injustice and inequality. But in many cases, it is misplaced. Dozens of studies find that people fail to realize how kind, generous, and open-minded others really are. We don’t have to remain stuck in this cynicism trap. Through science and storytelling, Jamil Zaki imparts the secret for beating back cynicism: hopeful skepticism—thinking critically about people and our problems, while honoring and encouraging our strengths.”
Read an excerpt from Hope for Cynics on Behavioral Scientist: “When I describe ‘cynics’, you might conjure up a certain type of person: the toxic, smirking misanthrope, oozing contempt. But they are not a fixed category, like New Zealanders or anesthesiologists. Cynicism is a spectrum. We all have cynical moments, or in my case, cynical years. The question is why so many of us end here even if it hurts us.”
How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days
By Kari Leibowitz
From the back cover: “Inspired by cutting-edge psychological and behavioral science research as well as cultures worldwide that find warmth and joy in winter’s extremes, How to Winter provides readers with concrete tools for making winter wonderful wherever they live and harnessing the power of small mindset changes with big impact to help readers embrace every season of life.”
Inside the Political Mind: The Human Side of Politics and How It Shapes Development
By Greg Power
From the back cover: “Combining insights from behavioral economics, change management, and comparative politics, [Power] argues for a different approach to political reform, one concerned less with institutional design and more with the existing logic of human behavior. One that starts inside the political mind, and works outwards from there.”
Read an article from the author of Inside the Political Mind on Behavioral Scientist: “Attempts to improve governance in some of the world’s most troubled states have been based more on the rational design of formal institutions than on the behavioral logic of the individuals that work inside them.”
Inspiring Change: How to Influence Behaviour for a Better World
Edited by Liam Smith, Jim Curtis, Peter Bragge, and Paul Kellner
From the back cover: “Based on extensive research and experience, the team at BehaviourWorks Australia (BWA) developed the highly respected BehaviourWorks Method—a tried and tested approach to influencing behavior for impactful and meaningful outcomes to build a better world. Featuring real-world case studies, Inspiring Change is a practical, in-depth guide on how to use the BehaviourWorks Method to foster economic prosperity, better health, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability.”
Is Your Work Worth It? How to Think About Meaningful Work
By Christopher Wong Michaelson and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas
From the back cover: “After a global pandemic that changed why, how, and what people do for a living, many workers find themselves wondering what makes their daily routine worthwhile. In Is Your Work Worth It?, two professors—a philosopher and organizational psychologist—investigate the purpose of work and its value in our lives.”
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York
By Ross Perlin
From the back cover: “Ross Perlin is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds.”
Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down
By Corey Keyes
From the back cover: “Languishing—the state of mental weariness that erodes our self-esteem, motivation, and sense of meaning—can be easy to brush off as the new normal, especially since indifference is one of its symptoms. Emory University sociologist Corey Keyes . . . [examines] the ripple effect of languishing on our lives before deftly diagnosing the larger forces behind its rise: the false promises of the self-help industrial complex, a global moment of intense fear and loss, and a failing healthcare system focused on treating rather than preventing illness.”
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
By Zoë Schlanger
From the back cover: “It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents. What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously?”
Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World
By J. Doyne Farmer
From the back cover: “We live in an age of increasing complexity, where accelerating technology and global interconnection hold more promise—and more peril—than any other time in human history. Using big data and ever more powerful computers, we can for the first time apply complex systems science to economic activity. This new science, Farmer shows, will allow us to test ideas and make significantly better economic predictions—and, ultimately, create a better world.”
May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It
By Alex Edmans
From the back cover: “Economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics—the science of cause and effect—ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically.”
Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
By Oliver Burkeman
From the back cover: “How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can ‘get on top of everything’? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice–and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully.”
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
By Yuval Noah Harari
From the back cover: “Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power.”
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
By Nate Silver
From the back cover: “Silver investigates ‘the River,’ the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life. These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century.”
The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center
By Rhaina Cohen
From the back cover: “Cohen argues that we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them, while we diminish friendships by expecting too little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn’t always fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love. At a time when many Americans are spending large stretches of their lives single, widowed or divorced, or feeling the effects of the ‘loneliness epidemic,’ Cohen insists that we recognize the many forms of profound connection that can anchor our lives.”
Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life
By Brigid Schulte
From the back cover: “[Brigid Schulte] . . . turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America’s quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives. Schulte casts a wide net in search of solutions and demonstrates the power of a collective and creative demand for change, showing that work can be organized in an infinite number of ways that are good for humans and for business.”
Read an excerpt from Over Work on Behavioral Scientist: “In conversation after conversation, workers said they spent their days being super busy . . . It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do. Their work hours were constantly interrupted and filled with busywork.”
Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death
By Susana Monsó
From the back cover: “With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today’s leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.”
Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World
By Kelly Clancy
From the back cover: “Neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy shows how intertwined games have been with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behavior and brought us to the brink of annihilation—yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology design. In this revelatory work, Clancy makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature and our actions.”
The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions
By Michael Norton
From the back cover: “Think of the way you savor a certain beverage, the care you take with a particular outfit that gets worn only on special occasions, the unique way that your family gathers around the table during holidays, or the secret language you enjoy with your significant other. To some, these behaviors may seem quirky, but because rituals matter so deeply to us on a personal level, they imbue our lives with purpose and meaning.”
Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America
By Beth Linker
From the back cover: “In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement and fears of disability gave slouching a new scientific relevance. Tracing the rise and fall of this socially manufactured epidemic, Slouch also tells how this period continues to feed today’s widespread anxieties about posture.”
Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World
By R. Jisung Park
From the back cover: “Drawing on a wealth of new data and cutting-edge economics, Park shows how climate change headlines often miss some of the most important costs. Park explains how climate change operates as the silent accumulation of a thousand tiny conflagrations: imperceptibly elevated health risks spread across billions of people; pennies off the dollar of productivity; fewer opportunities for upward mobility.”
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
By Cal Newport
From the back cover: “Long before the arrival of pinging inboxes and clogged schedules, history’s most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. Combining cultural criticism with systematic pragmatism, Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for cultivating a slower, more humane alternative.”
Read an adaptation from Slow Productivity on Behavioral Scientist: “This philosophy rejects busyness, seeing overload as an obstacle to producing results that matter, not a badge of pride . . . A focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.”
Smart Management: How Simple Heuristics Help Leaders Make Good Decisions in an Uncertain World
By Jochen Reb, Shenghua Luan, and Gerd Gigerenzer
From the back cover: “Making decisions is one of the key tasks of managers, leaders, and professionals. In Smart Management, Jochen Reb, Shenghua Luan, and Gerd Gigerenzer demonstrate how business leaders can utilize heuristics—simple decision-making strategies adapted to the task at hand. In a world that has become increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, the authors make the case against complex analytical methods that quickly reach their limits.”
Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times
By Steven J. Heine
From the back cover: “Heine’s field, existential psychology, uses the tools of science to study the kinds of questions famously asked by existential philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Who are we? Why do we seek meaning? How do we connect with one another? Drawing on decades of research, Heine provides scientifically grounded answers to these mysteries.”
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
By Charles Duhigg
From the back cover: “We all know people who are capable of connecting with almost anyone. What do they know about conversation that makes them so special? Skilled communicators know the importance of recognizing—and then matching—each kind of conversation, and how to hear the complex emotions, subtle negotiations, and hidden beliefs that color so much of what we say and how we listen.”
Read an adaptation from Supercommunicators on Behavioral Scientist: “Every meaningful conversation is made up of countless small choices. There are fleeting moments when the right question, or a vulnerable admission, or an empathetic word can completely change a dialogue.”
Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense
By Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun
From the back cover: “In our deluge of information, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish the revelatory from the contradictory. In Third Millennium Thinking, a physicist, a psychologist, and a philosopher introduce readers to the tools and frameworks that scientists have developed to keep from fooling themselves, to understand the world, and to make decisions.”
Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
By Michael Morris
From the back cover: “Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We’ve all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it’s been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination . . . Cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon. Countries, churches, political parties, and companies are tribes, and tribal instincts explain our loyalties to them and the hidden ways that they affect our thoughts, actions, and identities. Rather than deriding tribal impulses for their irrationality, we can recognize them as powerful levers that elevate performance, heal rifts, and set off shockwaves of cultural change.”
Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing
By Laura Mae Martin
From the back cover: “For more than a decade, [Martin] been coaching Google executives and employees on how to achieve a state of ‘productivity Zen’—a holistic approach to conquering everything from the avalanche of emails in their inboxes to becoming the master of their own calendars and running excellent meetings. In Uptime, [Martin] shows how to thrive no matter where you’re working, giving concrete steps that help you focus on your priorities and keep good systems, routines, and tactics in place.”
The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains
By Clayton Page Aldern
From the back cover: “The march of climate change is stunning and vicious, with rising seas, extreme weather, and oppressive heat blanketing the globe. But its effects on our very brains constitute a public-health crisis that has gone largely unreported. How we feel about climate change matters deeply; but this is a book about much more than climate anxiety. As Aldern richly details, it is about the profound, direct action of global warming on our brains and behavior.”
What Works, What Doesn’t (and When): Case Studies in Applied Behavioral Science
Edited by Dilip Soman
From the back cover: “Using seventeen case studies of such translation and scaling projects in diverse domains such as financial decisions, health, energy conservation, development, reducing absenteeism, diversity and inclusion, and reducing fare evasion, the book outlines the processes, the potential pitfalls, as well as some prescriptions on how to enhance the success of behavioral interventions. Cases showcase how behavioral science research is done—from getting inspiration, adapting research into context, designing tailored interventions, and comparing and reconciling results.”
Why People Do What They Do: And How to Get Them to Change
By Saadi Lahlou
From the back cover: “Drawing on a large body of empirical research, Lahlou shows that people’s behavior is predictable and shaped by ‘installations’ combining three sets of factors: what is technically possible (affordances of the environment), what people are able to do (embodied competences), and what monitors and controls behavior (social regulation). Lahlou shows how we can intervene at each of the three levels of installations to change human behavior, and how we can combine them for greater effectiveness and direction, with a robust, step-by-step method.”
Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters
By Charan Ranganath
From the back cover: “A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.”
Disclosure: Evan Nesterak of the Behavioral Scientist worked as an editorial consultant on Hope for Cynics.
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