Books like Superbloom — picked by fans

Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychologist who was sent to Auschwitz by the German Nazis because he was Jewish.

While in the camp, Frankl noticed that individual prisoners responded in totally different ways to the same appalling circumstances: some stole food from others, some hoarded their food, and some shared their food with others. He concludes that human freedom is ineradicable. He also learned from his camp experience that people want meaning in life as much as they want food or water. Human beings do not live for pleasure, but for the discovery of meaning.

I loved this very inspiring and compelling book about how some people, like Frankl, can rise above the most horrendous suffering.

Finite games aim at winning, whereby the game is over. Infinite games aim at continuing the play and are never over.

One’s career is a finite game that ends with success; one’s life is an infinite game that aims at continuation. What does this have to do with political rhetoric?

Some people make arguments in order to win them, while other people offer arguments in order to continue the game of argumentation. Some people tell stories for power or profit, while others tell stories to elicit other stories and keep the game going. Philosopher James Carse argues that we treat life too much as a series of finite games while missing the creativity and free play of infinite games.

After this book, you’ll never look at your life in the same way again. 

Robert Putnam is a Harvard political scientist who studies social trust, which he calls “social capital,” because once we earn trust, we can spend it for a long time.

Putnam argues that Americans in the mid-twentieth century had much higher levels of social trust than we do today, and this made for a much more stable and decent politics. That greater social trust, he argues, was the product of people joining clubs, fraternities, and other associations in huge numbers. Whereas people used to bowl in bowling leagues, now they generally bowl alone.

In case you are wondering about what has happened to our politics, Putnam offers a compelling diagnosis and a prescription for a better way forward. 

What if all kinds of human thought and speech could be boiled down to just two? According to psychologist Jerome Bruner, those two kinds of human thought are stories and arguments.

Bruner considers evidence from neuroscience and from cognitive science to argue that stories and arguments are processed differently by our minds and are rooted in different parts of our brains.

Stories are structured by their plots, while arguments are structured by logic. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, while arguments have premises and conclusions. Stories give us anecdotes, while arguments give us evidence. 

I love books that compellingly simplify complex matters with powerful new theories. 

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.

A classic treatise on how the mind works in a social context by two of the most famous social psychologists in the world. Why do people do what they do? It is not just a matter of their character or personality; we all respond to social norms, social pressures, and cultural contexts, more so than we think we do. And to understand someone else, we have to put ourselves inside their head and understand how they see the world, and how culture and the social context shapes that view. Many people who have read this book say it has fundamentally changed the way they view the world.

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.

This is a book about (social) identity and how our understanding of self is derived from the social groups we are part of.

Two brilliant psychologists, Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer, use their own research and insights from social psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how it influences our thinking and doing every single day.

The book really makes you think about how our social nature impacts on all kinds of decision-making, and it will give you new ideas and insights about power and influence. 

Oh boy, this monumental book certainly expanded my empathetic mind! The greatest lesson? The fact that true empathy requires a compassionate response. That was an eye-opener! This book has really stuck with me. I remember being entrenched and enthralled with every page while on a writing retreat. I can’t thank the author enough for helping me fine-tune my own books about the empathic experience!

Similar in tone to her well-known The Language of Emotions, this book doesn’t dive too deeply into metaphysical perspectives. Instead, this book is primarily grounded in psychology, history, and science. That is the very reason why we highly sensitive souls benefit from books like these; we are admittedly gullible and easy to manipulate if our empathy is uncontrolled! Understanding our abilities through a grounded psychological lens such as this is crucial for our emotional understanding.

I would heartily recommend this book to those interested in how musical abilities develop through childhood.

Hargreaves’ text was the first to put the developmental psychology of music on the map, identifying it as an important area of study for the first time and setting the scene for a major area of research in music psychology that continues to this day.

I love the way that Hargreaves combines empirical findings with observations of his own children in action, which makes it an engaging read.