The top books every researcher should read

What is great about research is that it is all about understanding people – but that makes it challenging too. The industry has always had deep roots in academia – and new thinking is constantly emerging across a range of areas. Even in the age of podcasts and TED Talks books have a vital place. We thought it would help to produce a booklist that can help. There is some heavy stuff here – but also some eclectic and light stuff. Even some holiday reading… maybe not.  It has been compiled by the Jigsaw team. We are hoping this will encourage you and us to read a bit more. It is meant to be provocative and interactive – we’d love to hear what you agree with – and more importantly what we’ve left out. Let us know! We do this to inspire and encourage – not to shame or guilt-trip, honest! Happy reading.

Classic Texts – For Purists

• The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
• The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
• On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers
• The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung
• The Division of Labour in Society by Émile Durkheim

Some Shortcuts – For Mere Mortals

• Basic Freud by Michael Kahn
• The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker
• Rough Guide to Psychology by Christian Jarett
• The Psychology of C.G Jung by Jolande Jacobi
• Creating Minds by John Dowling (Neuroscience)
• The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• Social and Cultural Anthropology: A very short Introduction by John Monaghan and Peter Just
• Social Psychology: Traditional and Critical Perspectives by Paul Dickerson

  BY SUBJECT Behavioural Sciences

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
• Seducing the Subconscious by Robert Heath
• Freakonomics by Dubner and Levitt
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Social Psychology

• The Person and the Situation by Lee Ross
• The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson
• Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us by Joshua Greene

Evolutionary Psychology

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think by Douglas T. Kendrick and Vladas Griskevicius
• 10 Types of Human: A New Understanding of Who We Are, and Who We Can Be by Dexter Dyas
• The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
• Evolutionary Psychology by David Buss
• Spent: Sex, evolution and the secrets of consumerism by Geoffrey Miller

Anthropology

• The Personality Puzzle by David C. Funder
• The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman

Eclectic/ Miscellaneous/Personal Choices     

• Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R Tufte
• Spurious correlations by Tyler Vigen Ali
• Between Therapist and Client: The New Relationship by Michael Kahn
• Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer
• The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Bluffer’s Guide to Marketing by Graham Harding and Paul Walton
• The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox by Stephen Jay Gould
• Integrating Behavioural and Cognitive Psychology: A Modern Categorization Theoretical Approach by Darren J. Edwards