Spent by Geoffrey Miller

Spent is yet another book that aims to apply evolutionary psychology to the way we behave, in this case the way we spend our money. And it starts well enough, with the simple observation that marketeers are exploiting our natural tendencies to “display” to others, which provides clues to who we really are. The author [...]

Free by Chris Anderson

By the author of The Long Tail, Free argues that give-aways are the surest road to success and riches. Marketers have understood the appeal of “free” to the human brain for a long time and indeed the author recalls how Jello made it big only after free recipe cards featuring the then-new product were given [...]

You are Here by Colin Ellard

You Are Here talks about how we orient ourselves in space and how feebly our otherwise developed brains compete with those of other animals, including small insects. Or do they? The story of Bedouin trackers that can unwind a CSI-like story from some faint camel tracks suggests that perhaps our brains can, indeed, orient quite [...]

Management Rewired by Charles Jacob

In reading Management Rewired I was expecting to find interesting anecdotes on how the latest research in “brain science” (brain science, maybe that should have rung a bell!) can be applied to management and instead I got … not much. The author’s war stories on how, as an overpaid management consultant, he had to work [...]

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Like many other books before it (e.g. Nudge, Predictably Irrational, Sway), How We Decide tackles why and how we make decisions. It has the best opening story of the lot, about landing an airplane with an engine on fire and quotes many airplane and non-airplane stories later in the book, some familiar from other books [...]

Buyology by Martin Lindstrom

Why do we buy what we buy, and specifically how do ads work? More importantly, how can companies make rational decisions on how to spend their advertising dollars?  Buyology and its extremely proud of himself author tell us all about it, thanks to a long and detailed study that uses MRIs and other fancy medical techniques [...]

The Logic of Life by Tim Arford

Could it be that economists don’t have enough to do doing whatever it is that economists should be doing? Following Outliers, Predictably Irrational, and Sway, The Logic of Life apply economic analyses to all kinds of choices we make every day. It turns out that there’s a good reason why there are so many women in [...]

The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner

Written by a Canadian journalist, The Science of Fear tells us that we are afraid of a lot of things that are not worth worrying about because they are extremely unlikely while we ignore fairly common dangers. So we worry about plane crashes but not car crashes; we worry about breast cancer but not diabetes; we worry [...]

Whatever Happened to Thrift by Ronald Wilcox

Whatever Happened to Thrift is a most timely book since it talks about the dismal savings rate of Americans, the problems this causes, and what could be done to reverse the trends. Some of the ideas seem fantastically difficult to implement (e.g. a consumption tax replacing the current income tax) but others seem almost too obvious, [...]

Sway by Ori Brafman & Rom Brafman

Sway is yet another contribution to the recently crowded field of books about why people behave the way they do. It focused on irrational behaviors, with many examples taken from sports, politics, and everyday life.  The stories are fun but try Blink or Freakonomics instead.