In Sapiens, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari covers the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical — and sometimes devastating — breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power … and our future.

What causes a behavior to happen? This is the question that Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky dedicates the pages of this book to help us understand. The result is one of the most dazzling tours of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a grand synthesis that harvests cuttingedge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do…for good and for ill.

How can you establish a customer-centric culture in an organization? This is the first comprehensive book on how to actually do service design to improve the quality and the interaction between service providers and customers.

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day.

Where did we come from? What is our connection with other life forms? What are the mechanisms of mind that define what it means to be a human being? Evolutionary psychology is a revolutionary new science, a true synthesis of modern principles of psychology and evolutionary biology.

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality video games. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses—one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer—and will understand how to do it.

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (2010) is about how to bring about change in an organization. Its main focus is changing behavior by appealing to the rational and emotional sides of people’s psyches.

Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, over 400,000 Web designers and developers have relied on Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design.

In this groundbreaking book Phil Barden reveals what decision science explains about people's purchase behaviour, and specifically demonstrates its value to marketing.

Newly revised and up-to-date, this edition of The Social Animal is a brief, compelling introduction to modern social psychology.

A behavioral scientist and dynamic animal trainer, Karen Pryor is an influential proponent of the principles and practical uses of positive reinforcement in teaching new behaviors. Here are the secrets of changing behavior in pets, kids — even yourself — without yelling, threats, force, punishment, guilt trips…or shooting the dog. Pryor’s clear and entertaining explanation of behavioral training methods made Don’t Shoot the Dog! a bestselling classic. Now, this revised edition presents more of her insights into animal — and human — behavior.

In "Design For How People Learn," you'll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you're sharing. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, "Design For How People Learn" will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.

A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes” — and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the field of influence and persuasion and his thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. You’ll learn the six universal principles of persuasion, how to use them to become a skilled persuader — and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.

We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind.

Hacking Human Nature for Good is a practical guide to changing human behavior. Based on 10 easy workbooks, you will be introduced to important behavioral economics principles that can be applied in all areas of behavior change. Each workbook includes practical exercises you can do by yourself or with your team.

A new wave of products is helping people change their behavior and daily routines, whether it’s exercising more (Jawbone Up), taking control of their finances (HelloWallet), or organizing their email (Mailbox).

Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans -- from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools -- must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human.

It's been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens.

Customers who have inconsistent, broken experiences with products and services are understandably frustrated. But it's worse when people inside these companies can't pinpoint the problem because they're too focused on business processes.

Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals.

An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D.

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way

The first book to explain the new science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity. After years of watching her students struggling with their choices, health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.

User interface (UI) design rules and guidelines, developed by early HCI gurus and recognized throughout the field, were based on cognitive psychology (study of mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language), and early practitioners were well informed of its tenants.

Before you can influence decisions, you need to understand what drives them. In The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton sets out to help you learn.

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it.

The new era of Gamification and Human-Focused Design optimizes for motivation and engagement over traditional Function-Focused Design. Within the industry, studies on game mechanics and behavioral psychology have become proliferate.

In today’s high-speed, customer-empowered world, the levels of swiftness and efficiency of customer journeys will determine ultimate success or failure. In this guide, Roger Dooley helps you spot the inevitable points of friction in your organization and products, and he provides the tools and insight you need to eliminate them. By truly understanding the impact friction can have, you’ll be able to establish positive habits and eliminate negative ones. Combining scientific research with real-life examples of organizations who have conquered friction, Dooley teaches you how to identify roadblocks, alter them for the benefit of both business and customer, and create positive, lasting change.

The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way we train the family pet. Drawing on a wealth of psychological research, Alfie Kohn points the way to a more successful strategy based on working with people instead of doing things to them.

A fascinating look at the evolution of behavioral science, the revolutionary way it’s changing the way we live, and how nurturing environments can increase people’s well-being in virtually every aspect of our society, from early childhood education to corporate practices. If you want to know how you can help create a better world, read this book.

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really

How do successful companies create products people can’t put down?

What happens when you've built a great website or app, but no one seems to care? How do you get people to stick around long enough to see how your service might be of value? In Seductive Interaction Design, speaker and author Stephen P.

Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive ou

Most organizations spend much of their effort on the start of the value creation process: namely, creating a strategy, developing new products or services, and analyzing the market.

Every day we make countless decisions, from the small, mundane things to tackling life’s big questions, but we don’t always make the right choices.

If the conscious mind—the part you consider you—accounts for only a tiny fraction of the brain’s function, what is all the rest doing? This is the question that David Eagleman—renowned neuroscientist and acclaimed author of Sum—answers in a book as acce

While excavating fossils in the tropics of Australia with a celebrity creationist, Will Storr asked himself a simple question.

Emotions feel automatic to us; that’s why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discov

We are profoundly social creatures – more than we know.

Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow.

Albert Bandura's highly anticipated examination of his vastly influential work on self-efficacy is now available.

We have unsatisfactory experiences when we use banks, buses, health services and insurance companies. They don't make us feel happier or richer.

Referring to Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators.

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings.

A global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race. Until around 11,000 b.c., all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved.

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals.

A touchstone for understanding how we behave on the job "This is a stimulating and provocative book in bringing together important ideas from different fields, and, thereby, giving us a whole new slant on 'human nature.'" --Edgar H.

A leading behavioral economist reveals the tools that will improve our decision making on screens Office workers spend the majority of their waking hours staring at screens.

What makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? If you said advertising, think again.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The instant classic about why some ideas thrive, why others die, and how to improve your idea's chances--essential reading in the "fake news" era. Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.

This extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct.

Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life.

"Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to discover, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D.

Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing.

This longawaited book by a pioneer in brain research offers a new model of our emotions- their origins, their power, and their malleability. For more than thirty years, Richard Davidson has been at the forefront of brain research.

Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us r

This book is an expanded and revised edition of the author's critically acclaimed volume Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. In twenty-six succinct chapters, Jon Elster provides an account of the nature of explanation in the social sciences.

In The Influential Mind, neuroscientist Tali Sharot takes us on a thrilling exploration of the nature of influence. We all have a duty to affect others—from the classroom to the boardroom to social media. But how skilled are

How does the situation we're in influence the way we behave and think? Professors Ross and Nisbett eloquently argue that the context we find ourselves in substantially affects our behavior in this timely reissue of one of social psychology's classic textbooks.

Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do organizations get stuck firefighting? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and

Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people—at work, at school, at home. It's wrong. As Daniel H.

This phrase captures a universal human experience--we can't always get ourselves to do what we know is best for us. In Well Designed Life, you will learn that the solution to this stumbling block resides in coupling two disciplines: brain science and design thinking.

Practical techniques for applying neuroscience and behavior research to attract new customers Brainfluence explains how to practically apply neuroscience and behavior research to better market to consumers by understanding their decision patterns.

The Behaviour Change Wheel — A Guide to Designing Interventions brings together theory-based tools developed in behavioral science to understand and change behavior to form a step-by-step intervention design manual. This is a practical guide to designing and evaluating behavior change interventions and policies based on the Behaviour Change Wheel, a synthesis of 19 behavior change frameworks that draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches.

If you reward your children for doing their homework, they will usually respond by getting it done. But is this the most effective method of motivation? No, says psychologist Edward L. Deci, who challenges traditional thinking and shows that this method actually works against performance. The best way to motivate people—at school, at work, or at home—is to support their sense of autonomy. Explaining the reasons why a task is important and then allowing as much personal freedom as possible in carrying out the task will stimulate interest and commitment, and is a much more effective approach than the standard system of reward and punishment.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design is not your typical how-to book. It features a novel way of teaching interactive designers how to create and improve their designs to incorporate the highest degree of fun. As the book shows, designing for fun is all about making interactive products like games highly entertaining, engaging, and addictive. The book's unique approach of providing a highly visual storyboard approach combined with a narrative on the art and practice of designing for fun is sure to be a hit with game and interactive designers.

Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colorful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker.Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.

In this illuminating exploration of one of the great mysteries of the human mind, University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley introduces us to what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make. Why are we sometimes blind to the minds of others, treating them like objects or animals? Why do we sometimes talk to our cars, or the stars, as if there is a mind that can hear us? Why do we so routinely believe that others think, feel, and want what we do when, in fact, they do not? And why do we believe we understand our spouses, family, and friends so much better than we actually do? Mindwise will not turn other people into open books, but it will give you the wisdom to revolutionize how you think about them—and yourself.

Evolutionary psychology-the compelling science of human nature-has clarified the prehistoric origins of human behavior and influenced many fields ranging from economics to personal relationships. In Spent Geoffrey Miller applies this revolutionary science's principles

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly.

Nudge meets Hooked in a practical approach to designing products and services that change behavior, from what we buy to how we work.

Can computers change what you think and do? Can they motivate you to stop smoking, persuade you to buy insurance, or convince you to join the Army? "Yes, they can," says Dr. B.J. Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

Prada stores carry a few obscenely expensive items in order to boost sales for everything else (which look like bargains in comparison). People used to download music for free, then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay. How? By charging 99 cents.

In engaging prose and with practical examples and anecdotes, an eye-opening look at human reasoning and essential reading for anyone with important decisions to make.

The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions. Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we “blink” and go with our gut.

Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives.

The Paradox of Choice In the spirit of Alvin Tofflers Future Shock, a social critique of our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret.

Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works.

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live.

Drawing on positive psychology, cognitive science and sociology, Reality is Broken shows how game designers have hit on core truths about what makes us happy, and utilized these discoveries to astonishing effect in virtual environments. But why, McGonigal asks, should we use the power of games for escapist entertainment alone? In this groundbreaking exploration of the power and future of gaming, she reveals how gamers have become expert problem solvers and collaborators, and shows how we can use the lessons of game design to socially positive ends, be it in our own lives, our communities or our businesses. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, Reality is Broken sends a clear and provocative message: the future will belong to those who can understand, design and play games.

Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics.

The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today.

An "entertaining and engaging" exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life-and how understanding them can improve everything you do. The world around you is pulling your strings, shaping your innermost instincts and your most private thoughts. And you don't even realize it.

There are few academics who write with as much grace and wisdom as Timothy Wilson. REDIRECT is a masterpiece.

Wendy Wood draws on three decades of original research to explain the fascinating science of how we form habits and offers the key to unlocking our habitual mind to make the changes we seek. A potent mix of neuroscience, case studies, and experiments conducted in her lab, Good Habits, Bad Habits is a comprehensive, accessible, and above all deeply practical book that will change the way you think about almost every aspect of your life. By explaining how our brains are wired to respond to rewards, receive cues from our surroundings, and shut down when faced with too much friction, Wood skillfully dissects habit formation, demonstrating how we can take advantage of this knowledge to form better habits.

At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone - perhaps ask a colleague a favour, negotiate with a contractor or get your spouse to put out the recycling. In the small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice - Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini - describe how, in today's information-overloaded world, it is now the smallest changes that lead to the biggest differences in results.

This book brings together a selection of his papers focusing on what he calls "exotic preferences"--the disparate motives that drive human behavior. In addition to covering the history and methodology of behavioral economics, they also touch on a wide range of fascinating topics such as the motives that drive extreme athletes, our propensity to want to get unpleasant experiences out of the way so we can focus on the more pleasant, and the psychology of curiosity

Two professors combine their fascinating and cutting-edge research in behavioral science to explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smart spending. Most people recognize that they need professional advice on how to earn, save, and invest their money.

In Invisible Influence, the New York Times bestselling author of Contagious explores the subtle influences that affect the decisions we make—from what we buy, to the careers we choose, to what we eat.