99 Books Like Revenge of the Tipping Point

Obviously, some of us are more aware of patterns than others. Simon Baron-Cohen—a psychologist at Cambridge, and one of the world’s leading authorities on autism—has found that a facility for pattern recognition is strongly correlated not only with gender (males predominate) but with autism.

He led a survey of 600,000 Britons aimed at determining if they were primarily empathizers, adept at connecting with other people, or systemizers, more interested in detecting patterns and learning how things work. Those at the extreme end of systemizing were considerably more likely to be autistic.

Baron-Cohen’s empathizer/systemizer questionnaire is included at the back of the book. Taking the bait, I found myself on the cusp of extreme. Which may explain a lot.

Okay, this one could surely be part of a list of books on artificial intelligence, but it's more than that: it's about the effects of networks of information—both real and fabricated, hallucinated, or intentionally-distorted —and their evolution and spread over the history of human culture, and secondarily, perhaps, about AI and its growing role as part of those information networks.

Despite a few flaws I found maddening (a brief section early in the book argues that genes don’t carry information), it is a very thoughtful and provocative work.

The most basic, the most life-determining story is the one you tell yourself about yourself. Who are you? How did you get to be that way? And by the way, what is reality?

I reviewed this book for The Wall Street Journal and found it eye-opening. I was struck by Berns’s account of “how other people’s narratives worm their way into our brains,” creating a consensus version of reality he calls “a shared delusion.”

This delusion can become self-limiting, even self-destructive. And so we have counterfactuals, the narratives of possibiity that allow us to escape these constraints—to change our story, if we have the will to do so.

This book addresses the key problem with pattern recognition: Why do we see patterns that don’t exist? And why are these patterns so often dark?

We assume that what our eyes see is actually there, and what our brains comprehend is real. Not necessarily so, but try telling that to your brain.

Confirmation bias leads us to filter out facts that challenge what we think. In any dispute, no matter the evidence, each side remains convinced it’s right and the other side is delusional. And because the brain always wants an explanation, it’s easy to conclude that there’s a secret set of rules, maybe even a secret cabal that enforces them.

Brotherton argues convincingly that conspiracy theories aren’t restricted to a bunch of paranoid kooks; they’re just a function of being human.

Malcolm Gladwell never disappoints me. He has said that when people meet him, they treat him like they know him. After years of reading his books and listening to his podcasts, his voice sounds like a friend's.

This book is one of my favorites because it gives me hope that with the right ingredients of passion, hard work, and opportunity, our efforts will tip toward success. It reminds me to open my eyes and watch for opportunities so that when we are in the business of passionate service, we may end up on a great adventure that we could not have predicted.

At once Jewish, French, and Christian, an ex-factory worker and field laborer, and political thinker whose short life was tragically ended by a hunger strike against Nazism, Simone Weil should today be remembered as the first thoughtful defender of our need for social and ecological roots.

Published posthumously, this extraordinary book is a withering protest against deracination: the forcible uprooting of peoples’ lives by unbridled capitalism, state socialism, nationalism, and war. Anticipating the recent celebration of the ideals of civil society, Weil stood against violence and every form of institutional standardization, bossing, and bullying. Felt obligations toward others, freedom from arbitrary power, and self-government based on citizens’ grounded consent are, for her, the mark of a good society.

Hofer, in simple, direct description, leads me to understand the way the soul of a religious or political fanatic is born. Once captured, the “True Believer” grabs the stunning power to seduce, entrap, and dominate other people to the cause.

Hofer’s knowledge of a fanatic’s power can be a power to resist fanaticism and its gurus.

James Alcock is the only social psychologist I know who could write a clear, accessible, and comprehensive volume on the psychology of belief—particularly how our thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is but to the world as we believe it to be. No matter how much you think you know about beliefs, and no matter what you actually believe, any reader will find surprises in Alcock’s treatise, such as why so many people cling to beliefs that are foolish, self-destructive, and wrong, believing them to be wise, self-protective, and right. Belief convinced me that faulty beliefs, arising from misapprehension about the cause of a disease, misperceptions of an enemy’s actions, misreading a lover’s motive, misconceptions about which, if any, gods are real, can lead to irrational, maladaptive, and sometimes deadly actions.

A concise and lucid sociological treatise that relates forgetting to the transitions and rapid changes of contemporary urban life, which has eroded the ways in which societies traditionally remembered the past.

The book, written in mid-century, has some of the most powerful hypotheses of social psychology, which, along with the ideas of fellow émigré from Germany, Kurt Lewin, gave birth to the field of social psychology. Read Chapter 4 at least. I do every 5 years or so. The chapter gave rise to both dissonance theory and attribution theory, two of the major accomplishments of social psychology.