As a product designer, much of my work revolves around decisions — how to arrange elements on a screen, what to emphasize, what tone a line of copy should take, etc. Each of these choices, however small, accumulates into something that either feels right or doesn’t.
To make these decisions with any confidence, I’ve found it helps to read. Not just about design, but about how the human mind works. How do we, as people, think, choose, and make decisions? Why are we drawn to certain patterns over other, and why do we mistake our impulses for reason?
Here’s a list of books that have expanded my understanding of human decision-making. They began as a way to design better, but they’ve ended up shaping how I see people, myself included.
1. Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman’s book gives us one of the most enduring ideas in modern psychology: the division between two modes of thought. “System 1,” quick, intuitive, emotional — and “System 2,” slow, deliberate, analytical.
We live, it turns out, mostly in System 1. It’s efficient, energy-saving, and often wrong (but rarely disastrously so). System 2 intervenes when stakes are high, when we stop to think, or when something feels off.
Kahneman teaches us that much of our confidence in our decision-making abilities is misplaced. Our biases are often invisible to us, and our rationality is but a fragile illusion. But in understanding these limits, we gain a better understanding of ourselves and, perhaps too, better judgment.
2. The Enigma of Reason
Authors: Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
We often assume that reasoning evolved so we could make better decisions, or arrive at the truth of a matter. Mercier and Sperber offer a more uncomfortable — but perhaps liberating — hypothesis: that reason evolved merely to persuade others.
According to them, our minds are less like scientists than spin doctors. In most cases, we make decisions intuitively (Kahneman’s System 1 again), and then use our reasoning capabilities to defend what we’ve already done. This works out well, they argue because us humans are social animals. We discuss our decisions with people, and it is other people who provide us with alternate perspectives and show us errors in out thinking processes. This turns out to be more efficient than evaluating the pros and cons of every choice individually.
Reasoning, in other words, is primarily a social function — a tool for explanation and persuasion, and not decision-making.
3. The Righteous Mind
Author: Jonathan Haidt
If The Enigma of Reason examines how we think, Haidt explores why we feel the way we do about right and wrong.
He likens our moral sense to a palate with six taste buds — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Each person, each culture, mixes these in different proportions, producing the rich and often bewildering variety of human morality.
Through this framework, political divisions becomes less like battles between good and evil, and more like disagreements between people with different moral emphases. Haidt gives us a language to see and understand with empathy people with inclinations different than our own.
4. The Person and the Situation
Authos: Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett
This book talks about one of our most persistent errors: the belief that people act as they do because of who they are, rather than where they are.
We forgive ourselves by citing circumstance (“I was late, tired, under pressure”), but deny others the same courtesy (“He’s rude. She’s selfish.”). This is known as the fundamental attribution error.
The book's message is simple: behavior is fluid and depends on circumstances. The kind person may act cruelly when rushed; the cruel person may act kindly when calm. The situation shapes us far more than we care to admit.
5. Alchemy
Author: Rory Sutherland
Rory Sutherland — being an advertising man — writes with a charm and playfulness natural to a stalwart of his profession.
His central argument is delightfully contrarian: that logic alone cannot solve human problems, because humans are not logical. We are driven by perception, emotion, and context — and often, the most elegant solutions are psychological, not technological.
Why make a train one minute faster, he asks, when you could make the journey more enjoyable (so that people don't spending an extra minute, or five, on the train)?
Alchemy is a celebration of lateral thinking, i.e., thinking outside the box.
Closing thoughts
Reading these books has certainly made me a better designer. But I think it has also made me a little more patient — with users, with my friends and colleagues, and with myself. It’s always humbling to be reminded of how much of what we call “rationality” is just storytelling after the fact.
But, as these books suggest, that’s not a flaw in the design of the human mind. It is what makes us so wondefully human.