The books that shaped my thinking. Each one is a lens on human nature — some through evolutionary biology, some through psychology, some through the sheer force of a good argument. If you have read my work and want to go further, start here.
Richard Dawkins
The book that reframed evolution around the gene rather than the individual. If you read one book on evolutionary biology in your life, make it this one. Dawkins writes with a clarity that makes complex ideas feel inevitable.
Steven Pinker
A devastating, meticulously argued case against the idea that the human mind arrives empty. Pinker dismantles three sacred myths — the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine — with humour and scholarship in equal measure.
David Buss
The definitive scientific account of human mating strategies. Buss draws on decades of cross-cultural research to show why men and women want what they want — and why knowing this makes relationships easier, not harder.
Robert Sapolsky
Sapolsky traces every human behaviour from the moment it happens back through the previous second, hour, day, decade, and million years. It is the most comprehensive account of human behaviour ever written — and somehow also one of the funniest.
Robert Wright
An elegant introduction to evolutionary psychology woven through the life of Charles Darwin. Wright shows how Darwinian logic illuminates everything from jealousy and friendship to self-deception and moral reasoning.
Matt Ridley
Why sex exists, why it is expensive, and why it has driven the most extravagant arms race in evolutionary history. Ridley is a superb science writer who makes the logic of sexual selection feel thrilling.
Matthew Walker
Sleep is not a design flaw. It is the single most effective thing you can do for your brain and body. Walker makes the evolutionary and neuroscientific case so persuasively that you will never look at a late night the same way again.
Yuval Noah Harari
The sweeping story of how a middling ape conquered the planet — not through strength but through the unique ability to believe in fictions. Harari’s writing is provocative, lucid, and impossible to put down.
Jonathan Haidt
Haidt tests ten ancient philosophical ideas against modern psychological science and finds that most of them were right — but for reasons the philosophers never imagined. Warm, wise, and deeply practical.
Robert Cialdini
The classic on the psychology of persuasion. Cialdini identified six principles — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity — that exploit evolved cognitive shortcuts. Essential for understanding how you are being influenced every day.
Daniel Kahneman
The masterwork on how the mind actually makes decisions — through two systems, one fast and intuitive, the other slow and deliberate. Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning research reshaped economics, medicine, and our understanding of human error.
Jonathan Haidt
Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Haidt shows that moral reasoning is mostly post-hoc rationalisation of gut feelings — feelings shaped by evolution to bind us into groups and blind us to opposing ones.
Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá
A provocative challenge to the standard narrative of human mating. Whether you agree with every claim or not, this book will force you to re-examine assumptions about monogamy, jealousy, and what is ‘natural’ in human sexuality.
Judith Rich Harris
Harris makes the startling, evidence-based case that parents matter far less than we think — and peers matter far more. It is one of the bravest books in modern psychology, and every parent should read it.
Daniel Gilbert
Gilbert reveals why humans are terrible at predicting what will make them happy — and why this systematic error is a feature, not a bug, of the forecasting machinery evolution gave us. Witty, surprising, and genuinely useful.
If these books resonate, you will enjoy my own work — where I apply evolutionary psychology to emotions, leadership, relationships, parenting, and the question of how to live well.
See my books