 | Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris
Buy new: £6.81 / Used from: £2.95 It's as good as the title implies. Self-justification, cognitive dissonance and why good people do bad things
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 | Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland
Buy new: £5.97 / Used from: £3.46 This was the book that got me into the whole area. A great starting point, covering many examples of personal and organisational bias
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 | Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
Buy new: £5.07 / Used from: £3.18 A quirky selection of research from a very likeable psychologist/behavioural economist. Not systematic but impassioned in its criticism of rational choice economics.
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 | Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H Thaler
Buy new: £5.84 / Used from: £4.18 Applies bias theory to questions of public policy, including the intriguing recommendation that we privatise marriage.
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 | A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives by Cordelia Fine
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £3.79 More up-to-date than "Irrationality", another good starting point on cognitive biases with interesting material about sexism, racism and other stereotypes.
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 | Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Mind by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Buy new: £6.97 / Used from: £2.80 Not as broad or as accessible as some of the others, but a good summary of lots of the academic literature on cognitive illusions
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 | How We Know What isn't So: Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich
Buy new: £7.34 / Used from: £5.87 Old but one of the very best-written, and by a prominent researcher. Goes on the attack against alternative medicine.
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 | Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini
Buy new: £10.96 / Used from: £9.28 Still a classic: with experiments and some undercover work, a psychologist finds out how marketers use our biases and heuristics to make us comply.
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 | Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Buy new: £5.63 / Used from: £2.15 Surveys an amazing breadth of bias research in the course of examining why we humans are so bad at being happy.
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 | Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by TD Wilson
Buy new: £10.88 / Used from: £9.31 A real overlooked classic: after a slow first few chapters it gets into why our knowledge of ourselves is so bad, with implications for happiness amongst other things
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 | Cognitive Illusions
Buy new: £31.57 / Used from: £42.67 A serious academic textbook, unlike the above popularisations. Essential if you want to learn about the controversies in cognitive bias research, even explaining how to do your own experiments.
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