Recommendations
Books Like The Undoing Project
Best books to read after The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
The Undoing Project is the human story behind the science of cognitive bias — the friendship between Kahneman and Tversky that changed how we understand human judgment. These 8 books extend the story into the science itself, its applications, and the broader question of how minds and markets fail.
- 1Buy
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman's 2011 synthesis of fifty years of cognitive psychology research is the science that The Undoing Project narrates the discovery of: reading both books together gives the human story of the research (Lewis) and the research itself (Kahneman), and the combination is more illuminating than either book alone.
- 2Buy
Moneyball
by Michael Lewis
Lewis's 2003 account of how the Oakland Athletics used statistical analysis to build a competitive baseball team with a minimal budget is the most important precursor to The Undoing Project in Lewis's own work — it ends with a brief encounter between Billy Beane and Kahneman that pointed Lewis toward the Kahneman-Tversky story, and it is the book in which Lewis first seriously engaged with the psychology of decision-making.
- 3Buy
Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely
Ariely's 2008 behavioral economics bestseller applies the same foundational research (on anchoring, loss aversion, the power of free offers, social vs. market norms) to specific and vivid everyday situations — the most accessible popular companion to The Undoing Project in the tradition of making cognitive science entertaining.
- 4Buy
The Big Short
by Michael Lewis
Lewis's 2010 account of the few investors who saw the 2008 financial crisis coming and bet against the mortgage bond market is the most dramatic real-world case study in the cognitive biases that The Undoing Project researches: overconfidence, the availability heuristic, the narrative fallacy, and the failure to weight low-probability catastrophic events correctly.
- 5Buy
Freakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt
Levitt and Dubner's 2005 popular economics bestseller applies economic analysis to unexpected questions and shares The Undoing Project's quality of using rigorous empirical methods to overturn confident intuitions — a complementary approach (economics rather than psychology) to the same basic question of why human judgment is so often wrong.
- 6Buy
The Power of Habit
by Charles Duhigg
Duhigg's 2012 account of the neuroscience and psychology of habit formation is the most popular adjacent book in the genre of popular cognitive science: where The Undoing Project focuses on the errors in deliberate judgment (System 2 failures), The Power of Habit focuses on the automatic behaviors (System 1 processes) that shape most of daily life.
- 7Buy
The Black Swan
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb's 2007 argument about the role of rare, unpredictable events in history applies the same foundational research on cognitive bias — particularly the narrative fallacy and the availability heuristic — to financial and historical forecasting, and his critical engagement with the psychology of overconfidence is a direct extension of the Kahneman-Tversky research program that The Undoing Project documents.
- 8Buy
Nudge
by Richard H. Thaler
Thaler and Sunstein's 2008 argument for choice architecture — designing decision environments that account for cognitive biases — is the policy application of the science that The Undoing Project describes the discovery of: if Kahneman and Tversky showed that human judgment is systematically biased, Thaler and Sunstein asked what to do about it.
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