• The best books on Emotional Intelligence - The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education by Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge
  • The best books on Emotional Intelligence - Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning: Research and Practice by ed. Durlak et al
  • The best books on Emotional Intelligence - The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science by ed. Seppälä et al
  • The best books on Emotional Intelligence - Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart by Tara Bennett-Goleman
  • The best books on Emotional Intelligence - Marrow: Love, Loss, and What Matters Most by Elizabeth Lesser

The best books on Emotional Intelligence, recommended by Daniel Goleman

We are taught to value intelligence and academic ability, but raw mental firepower does not always translate into success at work or a life of contentment. Just as important are the skills that make up ’emotional intelligence,’ says Daniel Goleman, whose bestselling book popularised the concept. Here he chooses five emotional intelligence books that explore its practical applications.

  • Five of the Best Self-Help Books of 2022 - Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin
  • Five of the Best Self-Help Books of 2022 - Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain
  • Five of the Best Self-Help Books of 2022 - The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke
  • Five of the Best Self-Help Books of 2022 - Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
  • Five of the Best Self-Help Books of 2022 - Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living by Dimitris Xygalatas

Five of the Best Self-Help Books of 2022, recommended by Avram Alpert

At the turn of the year, many of us take the opportunity to think about our lives—how they are going, and how we hope to live them in future. We asked Avram Alpert, author of The Good-Enough Life, to recommend five of the best self-help books of 2022 that might help our bids for self-improvement; his choices remind us that self-help is not only about life-hacks and diets, but about bringing the world more in line with our ideals.

  • The best books on The Decline of Violence - The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona Hathaway & Scott Shapiro
  • The best books on The Decline of Violence - Homicide by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson
  • The best books on The Decline of Violence - Statistics of Deadly Quarrels by Lewis F Richardson
  • The best books on The Decline of Violence - Violent Land by David Courtwright
  • The best books on The Decline of Violence - The Remnants of War by John Mueller
  • The best books on The Decline of Violence - Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy Baumeister

The best books on The Decline of Violence, recommended by Steven Pinker

Our TV screens may be full of news about war and crime, but this masks a fall in historical terms in the number of violent deaths that’s nothing short of astonishing, says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. He tells us how and why this happened. (This interview was updated 17 December, 2020, to include books that have come out since it was published in 2011)

  • The best books on Behavioral Science - Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum
  • The best books on Behavioral Science - How We Know What Isn’t So by Thomas Gilovich
  • The best books on Behavioral Science - Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
  • The best books on Behavioral Science - Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
  • The best books on Behavioral Science - Nudge by Cass Sunstein & Richard Thaler

The best books on Behavioral Science, recommended by Nicholas Epley

What can we draw from behavioral science to help us better understand each other? Nicholas Epley, Professor of Behavioral Science and Faculty Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, recommends the five best books for learning about an interdisciplinary field that draws from psychology, sociology, economics and anthropology.

  • Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness - Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
  • Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness - The Mechanization of the Mind by Jean Pierre Dupuy
  • Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness - Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by Gerald Edelman & Giulio Tononi
  • Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness - Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity by Thomas Metzinger
  • Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness - Klara and the Sun: A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

Best Books on the Neuroscience of Consciousness, recommended by Anil Seth

Nearly every human has a sense of self, a feeling that we are located in a body that’s looking out at the world and experiencing it over the course of a lifetime. Some people even think of it as a soul or other nonphysical reality that is yet somehow connected to the blood and bones that make up our bodies. How things seem, however, is quite often an unreliable guide to how things are, says neuroscientist Anil Seth. Here he recommends five key books that led him to his own understanding of consciousness, and explores why it is that what is likely an illusion can be so utterly convincing.

  • The best books on Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
  • The best books on Sigmund Freud - The Life And Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones
  • The best books on Sigmund Freud - Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst by Adam Phillips
  • The best books on Sigmund Freud - Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions by John Forrester
  • The best books on Sigmund Freud - Tribute to Freud by H.D.

The best books on Sigmund Freud, recommended by Lisa Appignanesi

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Sigmund Freud spent most of his life in Vienna, until fleeing to London just before his death in 1939. Using his classical education to illustrate his points, he introduced the idea that we have an ‘unconscious’ that plays an important role in our actions. For his sessions when patients talked freely to him about their thoughts in a one-on-one setting, he coined the term ‘psychoanalysis.’ Freud expert Lisa Appignanesi talks us through books that shed light on his life as well as his work.

  • The Best Books on Social Media and Political Polarization - Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America by Jaime Settle
  • The Best Books on Social Media and Political Polarization - The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral
  • The Best Books on Social Media and Political Polarization - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman
  • The Best Books on Social Media and Political Polarization - Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason
  • The Best Books on Social Media and Political Polarization - Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Matthew Salganik

The Best Books on Social Media and Political Polarization, recommended by Chris Bail

Convenient as it is to blame our political woes on the polarizing effect of social media, echo chambers, interference by foreign powers or other shadowy operators, the truth is that human nature and our search for identity and status are more likely culprits. Sociologist Chris Bail, a professor at Duke University and director of its ‘Polarization Lab’, talks us through what social science has to say about the connection between social media and political polarization.

  • The best books on Personality Types - Psychological Types by Carl Jung
  • The best books on Personality Types - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The best books on Personality Types - Murder Yet To Come by Isabel Briggs Myers
  • The best books on Personality Types - Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
  • The best books on Personality Types - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman

The best books on Personality Types, recommended by Merve Emre

Since its birth in the early twentieth century, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has become the most popular personality test in the world. Here, Merve Emre, author of the new book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, recommends five books that reveal how the language of ‘type’ has seeped into the marrow of American civic institutions and social life—from Fortune 500 companies to Breakfast at Tiffany’s.