Must-read psychology books

https://durmonski.com/reading-lists/must-read-psychology-books/

by durmonski • 5 years ago

164 85 5 years ago

durmonski.com

m1117• 5 years ago

"Everyone should read". Debatable.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Can you explain or are you just doing a drive-by post to show your disdain?

RuleOfBirds• 5 years ago

The author literally gives an individual reason why about half the books should be read by everyone and the other half by many based on their interests. What are your objections?

SubiculumCode4• 5 years ago

Because a lot of those books are complete shit. Fuck Freud. edit: Why? An example: Goodbye Sigmund Freud: The case for exorcising the ghost of Freud from the field of psychology https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2019.1...

Pamar6• 5 years ago

Personally I think that at least one book is missing:

"Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes" by Paul Watzlawick (1)

On the other hand it could very well be the case that the two main points of the book(2) are discussed also in one or more of the 10 listed in the OP.

1) https://www.goodreads.com/it/book/show/89200.Pragmatics_of_H...

2) The two points being: - What Communication and Meta-communication are, what purpose they serve and how these are a uniquely human trait. - The role of the therapist in treating dysfunctional families.

karmakaze3• 5 years ago

TIL Meta-communication:

It is based on the idea that the same message accompanied by different meta-communication can mean something entirely different, including its opposite, as in irony.

It's the real message, communication via a false message rather than about it.

Pamar6• 5 years ago

Watzlawick's take on meta-communication is this, basically:

Your cat can communicate to you that he wants some more milk. This is communication.

Your cat CANNOT communicate about its own communication, i.e. cannot "say" something like: "hey, you bastard, I meowed for milk 4 times already, are you deaf or just too lazy to pour some for me?".

This would be meta-communication, and no animal species can do it. It is like adding a whole extra dimension to it.

(The cat example is straight out of the book, as much as I can recall it, at least).

nofinator2• 5 years ago

I'm still tempted to read Emotional Intelligence. It's hard to believe it was published over 25 years ago. It's topic has been integrated a lot into work and home culture (including me), though there's still a ways to go (including for me).

Is it still a good read? Is there another book like it that hackers recommend?

karmicthreat• 5 years ago

I don’t think it’s necessarily the best book ever. But for me it was useful for thinking deeper about how I and other people perceive things.

qntty• 5 years ago

It wasn't a bad book but it could have been an essay. I really liked another book also by Goleman called The Meditative Mind.

dkarl• 5 years ago

I think it's still worthwhile. I first read it as a teenager, not long after it was published. It had a big impact, and I feel that since I read it, I've seen a lot in the culture that has referred to it, taken it for granted, regurgitated it, addressed individual topics from it, etc., but I'm not aware of anything that has replaced it as an overall introduction to the concept, which I think is due to quality of the writing. Even as a teenager I found easy and engaging.

The book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is a different book by a different author. Read the Daniel Goleman book instead, or at least first.

joshxyz• 5 years ago

Yep, still a good read. Great in cultivating some empathy and social acuity.

Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss is also worth checking out.

gnarbarian3• 5 years ago

Thinking fast and slow has profoundly changed how I view the world and continually provides me with tools I use to better myself and the organizations I'm a part of. I now regularly revisit my prior assumptions and attempt to reason from first principles and I am better at recognizing when to encourage it in others.

I've also read influence. It's Great but it didn't have near as much impact on me. but it does really drive home how people rationalize prior assumptions rather than logically arriving at conclusions.

qwerty4561273• 5 years ago

Is "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman really worth reading the whole book? I feel like I understand the phenomenon it describes (and I believe a page or two is more than enough to explain it), I'm glad somebody described it popularly and attracted attention of wide audience raising their awareness. But reading a 500 pages book is a huge investment of time and mental energy. What's there one might find worth it?

gnarbarian3• 5 years ago

I thought it was great. You might want to try the audiobook.

qwerty4561273• 5 years ago

I have no doubt it is great. And my life is not enough to read all the great books I want to, even if I were not ADHD, slow reader and generally overwhelmed. Why should I pick this one if I know what it is about already (and have in fact already started reading it once)? What will I find there that will make me feel glad I've actually read it? Can you come up with a curious quote from there perhaps? I mean a quote which a person understanding the concept can still find interesting.

Delk• 5 years ago

It's been years since I read it (and I didn't actually finish, but that's another story), so I might not remember things very well.

I think some of the examples of bias or other cognitive misgivings that he gives throughout the book could be insightful by themselves. It might be easy to express a general idea in a couple of pages, but concrete examples of the phenomena help bridge it to real life. It could also be interesting as a quick peek at how some of the studies were designed and conducted.

The problem for me is that, since at least some (perhaps many?) of the results Kahneman presents haven't actually been replicable, and I'm not an expert in the field, I have trouble figuring out which of them to believe and which, despite his convincing tone, might not be true after all.

The blog post of the title doesn't actually seem to even mention the problems with replication at all even though they're moderately well known, which kind of makes me want to question whether the "must-read" list has been really considered that critically at all.

belter• 5 years ago

On "Thinking, Fast and Slow" you might want to run through this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261501

hntrowaway837• 5 years ago

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baron_harkonnen• 5 years ago

I started that book long before the controversy around the reproducibility of some of the sections was widely discussed in public.

I got to the section on priming and immediately thought "what ridiculous bullshit", looked up the original paper and saw that my suspicions we absolutely justified. The statistical analysis of the results is garbage and the experiment design doesn't pass some basic sanity checks.

If this were some sort of purely pop-psych book I would have just brushed it off. Journalists often have to write to a deadline and don't have to time to dive into the details of everything, especially if it makes a good story otherwise.

However I was completely put off by the fact that this was written by someone who made understanding how we reason his life's work. In the book he even says something along the lines of "this sounds unbelievable but you have to accept it!"

I felt somewhat validated that years later this became a more widely accepted criticism but the popularity of both that book and the unquestioned esteem that Kahneman commands really repulsed me. The biggest value of that book is as an object lesson on why we have a reproducibility crisis in the first place. If even prize winning economists/psychologists won't ask the most basic questions about what they're being told there's no hope for the field.

unmole• 5 years ago

This! The book really should have been subtitled The Ludic Fallacy Run Amok. Even putting the priming disaster aside, it's filled with grand generalisations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioural experiments. I find it mind boggling that so many otherwise intelligent people don't find anything wrong with it.

honzzz2• 5 years ago

I have not read the book yet - would you please explain what about that priming section you did not like? Is it something specific that Kahneman says or the whole concept of priming? If it is the later, I would like to know what you critique, because I have always considered priming something obvious that I use to explain common life experiences without questioning it.

codeproject• 5 years ago

I think the book "think fast and slow" is overrated. is the work worthy of Nobel Prize? I was amazed, amazed so far nobody has raised this Issue.

radu_floricica• 5 years ago

Yes, it is. On the other hand, I thought his most recent book, Noise, could have been a quarter of the size. Ended up skimming the last half and googling for cliff notes. I have no criticism on the topic - it's both useful and insightful. But way too verbose.

navait2• 5 years ago

I read the whole thing and you're basically right. I enjoyed it still, but it's a book where you get 80% of the insghts in the first chapter. I also heard some of the expiriemtns mentioned in the book fell afoul of the replication crisis.

heroHACK17• 5 years ago

If, like me, you're interested in the subject matter of this book, I recommend reading The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis instead.

yboris• 5 years ago

I have often read books on topics I was already well-informed on. My philosophy is "think of it like a meditation". You might know very well about a psychological mechanism like the one described in Paradox of Choice (by Barry Schwartz) - you may have seen a TED talk and you already "get it". But it's rather different if you spent 10 hours of your life reading a variety of examples on the topic, and think about it (as you are reading it). The lesson sinks in far better - it is much more likely you will actually benefit from it.

jimkleiber• 5 years ago

This comment may be one of the best arguments I've ever heard for reading the vast majority of business/big-idea books. That it's about the repetition of the ideas, reading them over and over and ingraining them. I love this idea and it may actually encourage me to read these books or even re-read them.

I greatly appreciate this comment. Thank you.

loceng• 5 years ago

You're increasing the spave out takes up in your mind and therefore the weight/importance of it.

ChildOfChaos• 5 years ago

Indeed.

For me, I'd say reading the Summary is a good start to know if you want to read a book, but just because the basic idea is in that, I don't think it's all you need. I often find myself taking notes on different things than others have and linking it to other things in different ways.

You need to fully understand the Why and although there is an argument that most books are only a few ideas, the stories in the book help argue why these are important an help you see how those ideas fit into the world and how they fit, something that is truly important if you are going to start implementing that idea or thought into your way of thinking, else it's just another article you read on wikipedia that you nod your head too.

The human brain is all about patterns and connections and that is missed on a single article that is making a big point, a summary is exactly that, a good way to explain things in a simple and quick way, but you have to understand everything else behind it for you to truly understand it and for that you really need the whole book, unless you have a badly written book that fails to do this. I think this is vastly missed by those that just read summaries or dismiss the power of the whole book, just reading something doesn't really ingrain it into you, you have to wrestle and think about it in your own mind and being exposed to that idea from all different directions for a few hours really helps cement it.

It's also why I am considering rereading books I liked, even though I still remember the basic ideas and due to what I mentioned earlier, I think you can take different things from the same book if you read it at different points in your life, different connections will happen and different points will make more sense than they did before.

meej• 5 years ago

I read it before the stuff about the replicability issues surfaced and got around 75% through it. There’s useful stuff in it but it’s too long and I quit because it started to feel like he was repeating himself. He needed a better editor. As I read it I wondered if his editor was too intimidated by his Nobel Prize to do their job well.

nofinator2• 5 years ago

I highly recommend "The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making" by Scott Plous. It's a concise, 260-page survey of all the research into cognitive biases. It cites a lot of other research than Kahneman/Tversky and gets right to the heart of the topic without being dry.

alok-g5• 5 years ago

I note that it was published in 1993. Do you think it remains largely relevant given further research since then?

https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Judgment-Decision-Making-M...

alok-g5• 5 years ago

I feel exactly the same for many books. If a book summary on Wikipedia, etc., neither surprises me nor teaches me anything new, I have little motivation to read the book.

There's an 'Ask HN' thread on "high signal to noise ratio" books: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10027102 I note that "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is also listed here.

Wikipedia itself is of course lovely for high information density and is my go-to resource.

AzzieElbab• 5 years ago

Interesting, I never considered "Thinking Fast and Slow" and " "Persuasion" to be psychology books or I would not have read them

tome• 5 years ago

Where are you seeing "Persuasion"?

heymijo• 5 years ago

#2 on the list by Robert Cialdini. Durmonski omitted the full title from the list, which it is well known for.

The full title is: Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion

voisin• 5 years ago

The Body Keeps Score is one of the most impactful books I’ve read in the last few years. The thesis is that trauma resides not only in the brain as an experience, but in the body (the central nervous system) as a reaction to that experience, and so resolution of trauma must be more than “talk therapy”, and indeed the research shows that all manner of physical action helps to resolve trauma. There are many components that are needed, and I can confirm with my own n=1 study of the effectiveness of many of the techniques. I hope to continue with the things I am doing and try more of the things he talks about. Highly recommended!

Also, pair with “Widen the Window”

binaryorganic• 5 years ago

Same! I was so glad to see it’s inclusion in the list. It’s had a huge impact on me. Will check out Widen the Window.

jamesgreenleaf• 5 years ago

I'm surprised none of Robert Greene's books are on this list. Maybe they wouldn't be strictly categorized as psychology. The Laws of Human Nature delves into some psychology and personality types though, and is worth reading.

SubiculumCode4• 5 years ago

Flagged. Freud? Are you kidding me? Pop Psychology books? -signed, A disgruntled psychologist scientist who is tired of having his field maligned with bullshit.

dash2• 5 years ago

Here is how you could be more persuasive: use your expertise to explain why modern psychological science has moved on from Freud, how it's different from pop psychology, and to give some examples of solid, reproducible, insightful work in the field.

SubiculumCode4• 5 years ago

Goodbye Sigmund Freud: The case for exorcising the ghost of Freud from the field of psychology https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2019.1...

panosfilianos• 5 years ago

Provide an alternative list then for us who are interested.

Raminj952• 5 years ago

I would love to get a list of even say 3 or 5 books then that you think are "real". Im genuinely curious about this, i dont mean to come of as standoffish :)

SubiculumCode4• 5 years ago

Example? Sure:

1. The Wiley Handbook on the Development of Children's Memory by Patricia J. Bauer & Robyn Fivush. (A really excellent book, even if somewhat dated, a lot of it has withstood re-examination).

2. Memory Reconsolidation, edited by CM Alberini

3. The Nature of Emotion, Fundamental Questions 2nd Edition Edited by Andrew Fox.

I mean just go on google scholar, look for chapters on a topic you find interesting. You will more likely get the real stuff that way than pop psychology books, or by reading frauds like Freud.

billfruit• 5 years ago

The list seems very pop-psychology heavy to me. I would put William James, Principles of Psychology in the top spot.

In general William James writing seems full of profound ideas.

navait2• 5 years ago

Have any of the books in this list hit problems with replication, or later finding out the science isn't so good?

wodenokoto• 5 years ago

Yes. The Sigmund Freud book.

psysharp• 5 years ago

"How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain" by Lisa Feldman Barrett should be considered for this list.

durmonski• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing. Never heard of this book. I will check it out.

jhap• 5 years ago

I second the recommendation. I thought it was great.

alok-g5• 5 years ago

The very first review I see at Amazon (Kimberly) is saying "Book's main premise is an erratic, non-peer reviewed assertion". The said review is detailed and has cited multiple references. I don't know what to conclude. Advice would help.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/15098...

rramadass2• 5 years ago

You should not let one review stop you from reading Barrett's book. The subject is highly fascinating and important since much of our lives are ruled by emotions and feelings. I note that the review is from one "emotion researcher" who might be focusing on finer nuances which might not be relevant for a initial broad understanding of the topic for a general audience. Also the reviewer quotes Paul Ekman (i got introduced to this subject through his book Emotions Revealed) who has had his own research questioned - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Criticisms. Nothing is set in stone here; marrying Social Psychology to concrete Neuroscience is a very difficult endeavour so an exposure to all viewpoints should be sought out.

nazgulnarsil• 5 years ago

It's a bad list

briefcomment• 5 years ago

Relevant: "Reversals in Psychology" [1] [2]

[1] https://www.gleech.org/psych

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27709266

crazygringo• 5 years ago

I disagree, that's not relevant at all.

These are books that synthesize huge amounts of data. They're incredibly valuable and have plenty of third-party reviews you can read to further learn what their strengths and weaknesses are. They're not perfect, but nothing in science is.

On the other hand, the post you're linking to is a bunch of tiny hand-picked studies that haven't had replication succeed -- as would be trivial to assemble such a list in any field. Those studies don't form the main underpinning of any of these books, so they don't have anything to do with it.

imbnwa• 5 years ago

I'd recommend Three Essays on Sexuality over Interpretation of Dreams.

Rzor• 5 years ago

The little I understood about Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart was really interesting. It's about the effectiveness of simple heuristics sometimes outshining sophisticated methods and really thriving in the unknown. Also, it's a bit weird that Gerd Gigerenzer doesn't usually appear in the same circles as Kahnemann does. His Wikipedia page alone would tell you this and his research really adds a nice counter-weight to the argument of irrationality of human minds.

andrei_says_• 5 years ago

Come as you are. It is sold as a book about sex but it’s a (pop-) psychology book. Compassionate, practical, empowering.

Punished by rewards by Alfie Kohn. The amount of research showing that incentivizing people kills internal motivation is… staggering.

aristofun• 5 years ago

The irony is that at least half of these books has almost nothing to do with psychology (as a theoretical or practical science).

rramadass2• 5 years ago

Has anybody here read Watson and Tharp's Self-Directed Behavior: Self-Modification for Personal Adjustment ? Any review/insight/recommendation would be much appreciated.

ajdude• 5 years ago

When I was in undergrad, my psychology professor gave me a list of books[0] to read; “if you read these books, you’ll be one of the smartest people in the world.” I actually noticed one of the books on that list!

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100527123450/http://www.gbc.ed...

Must-read psychology books

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