Experts > Nicholas Epley

Nicholas Epley's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Nicholas Epley recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Nicholas Epley's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
It’s the twenty-first century, and although we tried to rear unisex children--boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks--we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it, and everywhere we hear about vitally important “hardwired” differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math,... more
Recommended by Nicholas Epley, and 1 others.

Nicholas EpleyCornelia’s book is a rigorous walk through the scientific literature that presents the facts about gender differences. She blows up a lot of the popular books which posited that ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’ and described the male and female brain as fundamentally different. Cordelia’s book puts the real and relatively small differences between men and women into perspective. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

2
In this meticulously researched and masterfully written book, Pulitzer Prize-winner Deborah Blum examines the history of love through the lens of its strangest unsung hero: a brilliant, fearless, alcoholic psychologist named Harry Frederick Harlow. Pursuing the idea that human affection could be understood, studied, even measured, Harlow (1905-1981) arrived at his conclusions by conducting research-sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrible-on the primates in his University of Wisconsin laboratory. Paradoxically, his darkest experiments may have the brightest legacy, for by studying "neglect"... more
Recommended by Nicholas Epley, Vivette Glover, and 2 others.

Nicholas EpleyIt’s a book about Harry Harlow, a primatologist, a psychologist who worked mostly with rhesus macaques. He became a giant in the field of behavioral science through his work on attachment. Blum gives a great historical perspective on how psychologists thought about interpersonal attachment for most of our history and how Harry Harlow changed that. Harlow introduced the concept of love to the... (Source)

Vivette GloverThis centres round the work of Harry Harlow who worked with monkeys and needed to breed more of them. He isolated them very early and took them away from their mothers and kept them clean and well-fed. They were fat and appeared healthy but they were miserable and rocked backwards and forwards. He started to understand that what was missing was maternal affection. This was very out of the current... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

3
Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life.

When can we trust what we believe—that "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"—and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs,...
more
Recommended by Jonah Lehrer, Nicholas Epley, and 2 others.

Jonah LehrerA really smart book and the reason I put it on there is that it really invented the genre of science non-fiction. (Source)

Nicholas EpleyThis is a book about intuitive human judgment and how the way we think about the world can be distorted and misdirected by forces within our own mind, like our tendency to think well of ourselves, by cognitive forces, such as the ease with which information comes to mind, and by environmental forces, like asymmetries in feedback. (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

4

Stumbling on Happiness

• Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? • Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? • Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? • Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song while listening to another; and why does the line at the grocery store always slow down the moment we join it? In this brilliant, witty, and accessible book, renowned Harvard psychologist Daniel... more

Jonathan HaidtHe’s one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology – he’s just endlessly witty, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster. (Source)

Maria PopovaDan Gilbert "Stumbling Unhappiness" should be required reading for every human being. (Source)

Lisa Feldman BarrettOne of the ideas in this book is that minds are predictive, not reactive. It feels to us like we just react to the things that are happening to us, but in fact our brains are constantly guessing what’s going to happen in the next moment. Dan’s book was one of the first books that really took on this idea of prediction – which is, I would say, one of the great innovations in the last decade or two... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

5
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. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our...
more

Dan ArielyNudge is a very important book. One of the reasons Nudge is so important is because it’s taking these ideas and applying them to the policy domain. Here are the mistakes we make. Here are the ways marketers are trying to influence us. Here’s the way we might be able to fight back. If policymakers understood these principles, what could they do? The other important thing about the book is that it... (Source)

Eric RiesA pioneer in behavioral economics and just recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, his classic book on how to make better decisions. (Source)

Ryan HolidayThis might feel like a weird book to include, but I think it presents another side of strategy that is too often forgotten. It’s not always about bold actors and strategic thrusts. Sometimes strategy is about subtle influence. Sometimes it is framing and small tweaks that change behavior. We can have big aims, but get there with little moves. This book has excellent examples of that kind of... (Source)

See more recommendations for this book...

Don't have time to read Nicholas Epley's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.

Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

  • Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
  • Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
  • Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.