Books about Behaviour
People are complex. We are not always rational. We are biased. We are influenced by many external and internal factors when making decisions.
So, how do public purpose workers understand the nature of people, how they make decisions, think about trade-offs, and the influences that are at play when consumers, stakeholders, and constituents make decisions?
IPAA Queensland in collaboration with our partners MGD Wealth and Morningstar were delighted to host the public purpose sector to our next event collaboration for the public purpose community in March 2023.
During this breakfast event, Dr Ryan O. Murphy shared insights drawing from his extensive experience in interdisciplinary behavioural science and behavioural economics; and during his keynote, shared some top reads for those in the public purpose sector keen to read more about this fascinating discipline.
Title: Risk Savvy
Author: Gerd Gigerenzer
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
A fascinating, practical guide to making better decisions with our money, health and personal lives from Gerd Gigerenzer, the author of Reckoning with Risk.
Numbers don’t lie – but they often mislead us. From health risks to financial decisions, we often find it hard to make decisions because the statistics have been presented to us by ‘experts’ who misinterpret the data themselves.
Here Gerd Gigerenzer shows how we can all use simple rules to become better-informed, risk-savvy citizens.
Title: The Book of Why
Author: Judea Pearl & Dana Mackenzie
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
A pioneer of artificial intelligence shows how the study of causality revolutionized science and the world.
‘Correlation does not imply causation.’
This mantra was invoked by scientists for decades in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer and carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis.
Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl’s discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we can think better.
Title: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
The phenomenal New York Times Bestseller by Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow offers a whole new look at the way our minds work, and how we make decisions. Why is there more chance we’ll believe something if it’s in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices- fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. This book reveals how our minds are tripped up by error and prejudice (even when we think we are being logical), and gives you practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking. It will enable to you make better decisions at work, at home, and in everything you do. %%%The New York Times Bestseller, acclaimed by author such as Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt, Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Nudge co-author Richard Thaler, Thinking Fast and Slow offers a whole new look at the way our minds work, and how we make decisions. Why is there more chance we’ll believe something if it’s in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices- fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. This book reveals how our minds are tripped up by error and prejudice (even when we think we are being logical), and gives you practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking. It will enable to you make better decisions at work, at home, and in everything you do.
Title: Thinking in Bets
Author: Annie Duke
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
Poker champion turned business consultant Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result. In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history- With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots’ one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a hand off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted and the Seahawks lost.
Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck? Even the best decision doesn’t yield the best outcome every time. There’s always an element of luck that you can’t control, and there is always information that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets- How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making? Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.
For most people, it’s difficult to say “I’m not sure” in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don’t always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don’t always lead to bad outcomes. By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don’t, you’ll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You’ll become more confident, calm, compassionate and successful in the long run.
Title: Think Again
Author: Adam Grant
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
Bestselling author and TED podcast star, Adam Grant examines the critical art of rethinking — how questioning your beliefs and knowing what you don’t know can lead you to success at work and happiness at home.
Discover how rethinking can lead to excellence at work and wisdom in life. Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world it might matter more that we can rethink and unlearn.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people’s minds-and our own. As Wharton’s top-rated professor and the bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, he tries to argue like he’s right but listen like he’s wrong.
Think Again invites us to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility, humility, and curiosity over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.
Title: The Signal and the Noise
Author: Nate Silver
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
From the financial crisis to ecological disasters, we routinely fail to foresee hugely significant events, often at great cost to society. The rise of ‘big data’ has the potential to help us predict the future, yet much of it is misleading and useless.
Nate Silver accurately predicted the results of every state in the 2012 US election, cementing his reputation as one of our most prophetic forecasters.
Here he takes us on an enthralling insider’s tour of the high-stakes world of prediction, showing how we can all learn to detect the true signals amid the noise of data.
Title: Super Forecasting
Author: Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?
In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people&;including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer&;who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They&;ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are “superforecasters.”
In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden&;s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course.
Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future; whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life and is destined to become a modern classic.
Title: Nudge
Author: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
Since the original publication of Nudge more than a decade ago, the word “nudge” has entered the vocabulary of businesspeople, policymakers, engaged citizens, and consumers everywhere. The book has given rise to more than 200 “nudge units” in governments around the world and countless groups of behavioral scientists in every part of the economy. It has taught us how to use thoughtful “choice architecture”—a concept the authors invented—to help us make better decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society.
Now, the authors have rewritten the book from cover to cover, making use of their experiences in and out of government over the past dozen years as well as the explosion of new research in numerous academic disciplines. It offers a wealth of new insights, for both its avowed fans and newcomers to the field, about a wide variety of issues that we face in our daily lives—COVID-19, health, personal finance, retirement savings, credit card debt, home mortgages, medical care, organ donation, climate change, and “sludge” (paperwork and other nuisances that we don’t want and keep us from getting what we do want)—all while honoring one of the cardinal rules of nudging: make it fun!
Title: Moneyball
Author: Michael Lewis
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only ‘the single most influential baseball book ever’ (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what ‘may be the best book ever written on business’ (Weekly Standard).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it-before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?
With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar’s Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can’t buy: the secret of success in baseball.
The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities-his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission -but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.
What these geek numbers show – no, prove – is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.
Billy paid attention to those numbers – with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to – and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.
In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?
Title: Factfulness
Author: Hans Rosling
Link to Booktopia
About the Book:
“This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance, and my final attempt at making an impact on the world. It has been my daily inspiration and joy. In my previous battles I armed myself with huge data sets, beautiful software, an energetic lecturing style and a Swedish bayonet for sword swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope that this book will be.”
When you ask people simple questions about global trends, they systematically get the answers wrong. How many young women go to school? What’s the average life expectancy across the world? What will the global population will be in 2050? Do the majority of people live in rich or poor countries?
In Factfulness, Hans Rosling and his two lifelong collaborators, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling-Ronnlund, show why this happens. Based on a lifetime’s work promoting a fact-based worldview, they reveal the ten dramatic instincts, and the key preconceptions, that lead to us consistently misunderstanding how the world really works.
Inspiring and revelatory, Factfulness is a book of stories by a late legend, for anyone who wants to really understand the world.