84 books like Design for Cognitive Bias

For anyone tempted to label good listening as “soft skills,” this book will prove you wrong! Even though the book was published in 2010, Goulston positions listening as a vital skill all the more needed in today’s fractious times.

Each chapter is structured with a high-stakes story, “Usable Insights,” and “Action Steps,” with excellent, researched info in between. From the chapter titled “Nine Core Rules for Getting Through to Anyone,” I personally learned so much from this book that I could apply to my daily interactions—particularly those with my very argumentative teenage daughter!

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.

In this book, David Macauley presents flaw after flaw of our reasoning and the many ways we trip ourselves up, illustrated with entertaining stories, fascinating research, and a sense of humor.

Many of my sketches tackle the cognitive biases (so many identified by Daniel Kahneman), logical fallacies, and heuristics that help us make sense of the world. I listened to the audiobook and immediately bought the paperback to read through it again.

David Macauley's book is popular science and smart thinking at its most entertaining and applicable. Great fun.

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. 

This book grabs your attention right from the start. Four people are on a train, and one of them believes in witches. That’s crazy, right? (The witches part, not the train part.) But can you prove that he is wrong? One character trusts science, and only science. Another is a relativist, who believes that each person’s opinion is “true for them.” And then there is the annoying young philosopher, who is just as irritating as she is logical. This is a great book about truth, knowledge, fallibility, and tolerance. Timothy Williamson is one of the best philosophers alive today, and yet this book is accessible and engaging for anyone who wants to think about fundamental questions. The characters are compelling, and the writing is witty and fun.