Chapter 15: Further Reading

Essential Sources

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The bestselling book that popularized cognitive biases. Read it — but read it alongside the replication critiques and the ecological rationality perspective.

Gigerenzer, G. (2008). Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty. Oxford University Press. Gigerenzer's most accessible academic book arguing that heuristics are adaptive, not irrational. The essential counterweight to the Kahneman narrative.

Doyen, S., Klein, O., Pichon, C. L., & Cleeremans, A. (2012). "Behavioral priming: It's all in the mind, but whose mind?" PLOS ONE, 7(1), e29081. The study that found the elderly priming effect only appeared when experimenters expected it — suggesting experimenter bias, not social priming.

Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press. Argues that reasoning evolved for social argument, not truth-seeking. Provides a radical reframing of confirmation bias as a feature, not a bug.

Shanks, D. R., et al. (2013). "Priming intelligent behavior: An elusive phenomenon." PLOS ONE, 8(4), e56515. Nine experiments failing to replicate the professor/soccer hooligan priming effect. A systematic dismantling.

Greenwald, A. G., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2015). "Statistically small effects of the Implicit Association Test can have societally large effects." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(4), 553–561. The IAT creators' defense of the measure. Read alongside Oswald et al. (2013) meta-analysis showing weak predictive validity for balanced assessment.

Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P. E. (2013). "Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(2), 171–192. Meta-analysis finding that the IAT is a poor predictor of actual discriminatory behavior (r ≈ 0.10–0.15).

Gigerenzer, G. (2014). Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions. Viking. The most accessible popular book on heuristics as adaptive tools. Excellent companion to Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown. Shows how cognitive biases can be overcome — not through awareness alone but through specific practices (calibration, updating, perspective-taking). Evidence-based debiasing.

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational. Harper. Popular behavioral economics. Engaging and well-written but read with awareness that some findings cited have weakened since publication.

Online Resources

The Behavioral Scientist (behavioralscientist.org). Online magazine bridging behavioral science research and practice. More nuanced than typical business applications of bias research.

Cognitive Bias Codex (Wikipedia). The famous visualization of 180+ biases. Useful as a reference, but remember: not all listed biases have strong evidence, and the framing implies all are errors.