The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Terrorism exploitation of the sensational: see the essay in taleb (2004c).

General books on psychology of decision making (heuristics and biases): Baron (2000) is simply the most comprehensive on the subject. Kunda (1999) is a summary from the standpoint of social psychology (sadly, the author died prematurely); shorter: Pious (1993). Also Dawes (1988) and Dawes (2001). Note that a chunk of the original papers are happily compiled in Kahneman et al. (1982), Kahneman and Tversky (2000), Gilovich et al. (2002), and Slovic (2001a and 2001b). See also Myers (2002) for an account on intuition and Gigerenzer et al. (2000) for an ecological presentation of the subject. The most complete account in economics and finance is Montier (2007), where his beautiful summary pieces that fed me for the last four years are compiled—not being an academic, he gets straight to the point. See also Camerer, Loewenstein, and Rabin (2004) for a selection of technical papers. A recommended review article on clinical “expert” knowledge is Dawes (2001).

More general psychology of decision presentations: Klein (1998) proposes an alternative model of intuition. See Cialdini (2001) for social manipulation. A more specialized work, Camerer (2003), focuses on game theory.

General review essays and comprehensive books in cognitive science: Newell and Simon (1972), Varela (1988), Fodor (1983), Marr (1982), Eysenck and Keane (2000), Lakoff and Johnson (1980). The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science has review articles by main thinkers.

Evolutionary theory and domains of adaptation: see the original wilson (2000), kreps and Davies (1993), and Burnham (1997, 2003). Very readable: Burnham and Phelan (2000). The compilation of Robert Trivers’s work is in Trivers (2002). See also Wrangham (1999) on wars.

Politics: “the Political Brain: A Recent Brain-imaging Study Shows That Our Political Predilections Are a Product of Unconscious Confirmation Bias,” by Michael Shermer, Scientific American, September 26, 2006.

Neurobiology of decision making: for a general understanding of our knowledge about the brain’s architecture: Gazzaniga et al. (2002). Gazzaniga (2005) provides literary summaries of some of the topics. More popular: Carter (1999). Also recommended: Ratey (2001), Ramachandran (2003), Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998), Carter (1999, 2002), Conlan (1999), the very readable Lewis, Amini, and Lannon (2000), and Goleman (1995). See Glimcher (2002) for probability and the brain. For the emotional brain, the three books by Damasio (1994, 2000, 2003), in addition to LeDoux (1998) and the more detailed LeDoux (2002), are the classics. See also the shorter Evans (2002). For the role of vision in aesthetics, but also in interpretation, Zeki (1999).

General works on memory: in psychology, schacter (2001) is a review work of the memory biases with links to the hindsight effects. In neurobiology, see Rose (2003) and Squire and Kandel (2000). A general textbook on memory (in empirical psychology) isBaddeley(1997).

Intellectual colonies and social life: see the account in collins (1998) of the “lineages” of philosophers (although I don’t think he was aware enough of the Casanova problem to take into account the bias making the works of solo philosophers less likely to survive). For an illustration of the aggressiveness of groups, see Uglow (2003).

Hyman Minsky’s work: Minsky (1982).

Asymmetry: prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky [1979] and Tversky and Kahne-man [1992]) accounts for the asymmetry between bad and good random events, but it also shows that the negative domain is convex while the positive domain is concave, meaning that a loss of 100 is less painful than 100 losses of 1 but that a gain of 100 is also far less pleasurable than 100 times a gain of 1.

Neural correlates of the asymmetry: see davidson’s work in goleman (2003), lane et al. (1997), and Gehring and Willoughby (2002). Csikszentmihalyi (1993, 1998) further explains the attractiveness of steady payoffs with his theory of “flow.”

Deferred rewards and its neural correlates: Mclure et al. (2004) show the brain activation in the cortex upon making a decision to defer, providing insight on the limbic impulse behind immediacy and the cortical activity in delaying. See also Loewenstein et al. (1992), Elster (1998), Berridge (2005). For the neurology of preferences in Capuchin monkeys, Chen et al. (2005).