Summer moves fast. Schedules fill quickly. Backyard gatherings. Weddings. Reunions. A few choice weekends marked “Beach” on the calendar. The annual road trip home.
But summer moves slowly, too. A calm morning sipping coffee on the porch. Sprawling out on a beach towel in between swims. Conversations during long evenings that seem to push night further and further away. Time seems to open up as one moment melts into the next, delightfully, unexpectedly.
Each year, we hope to capture this spirit in our Summer Book List. The list features new behavioral science books published from January through August, and, like summer, is an exercise in welcoming contrast. Authors explore the possible upside of AI and grapple with potential consequences. Others probe productivity and, along with it, the tension between busyness, focus, and purpose. Relationships, randomness, and work make appearances, as do the topics of language and languishing.
Each book on the list piqued our curiosity and inspired us to think differently about our psychology and behavior. We hope they do the same for you.
— Antonia Violante, Books Editor, and Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief
P.S—You can find our list of notable behavioral science books from 2023 here and 2022 here.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 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.”
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.’”
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.”
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 . . . has written the first definitive book on the subject, examining 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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 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: Dilip Soman is a member of an organization which provided financial support to Behavioral Scientist in 2023. Organizational donors and advisors do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
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