I adore books on neuroscience and the new psychology of unconscious decision-making: Sway, Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, and The Hidden Brain. I also watch lots of 20-minute videos from Ted.com. Below is a video about choosing things:
Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decision-making, that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. This and other ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of the human psyche. If this brainy video captivates you, go to my website BrainBiases.com for more.
