Reading List

Authors Like Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely's subject started in a hospital bed. In his last year of high school in Israel, at seventeen, flammable material he was mixing for a youth-movement ceremony exploded, and he spent about three years in hospital with burns over some seventy percent of his body. Every day the nurses ripped his bandages off as fast as they could, believing that was kindest; years later he tested whether they were right, and found that a slower, longer removal hurts less overall. That question — why intelligent people, nurses included, reliably get things wrong — became Predictably Irrational (2008), written while he taught behavioural economics at MIT, before he moved to Duke that year. Readers come to him for the experiment told as a story: free chocolate, cheating students, decoy prices, and the conclusion that our mistakes follow patterns precise enough to plan around. Some of that research has since been retracted, and one question below covers what happened. The writers below share his subject — how people actually decide, spend, persuade and cheat — and most of them, like him, argue from studies rather than anecdote.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Behavioural economics · Psychology of decisions · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Dan Ariely, start with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, the research his books stand on. Richard Thaler's Misbehaving tells how behavioural economics was built, Robert Cialdini's Influence is the persuasion book Ariely readers reach for next, and Barry Schwartz takes one irrationality — too much choice — and follows it all the way. And before you trust any of them completely, read Stuart Ritchie.

10 authors like Dan Ariely

01
The research underneath

Daniel Kahneman

Israeli-American · b. 1934 · Psychologist

Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky from the 1970s on heuristics, biases and prospect theory is the foundation of behavioural economics, and won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, six years after Tversky's death. Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) sets out the two systems of thought — fast and intuitive, slow and deliberate — for a general reader. Noise (2021), written with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, is about the random scatter in human judgement. He died in March 2024, aged 90.

The book that explains why Ariely's experiments come out the way they do. Ariely shows the mistake in a single vivid study; Kahneman gives the model of the mind that produces it, and is more careful about the limits of the evidence. It is longer and harder than Predictably Irrational, and the more lasting of the two.

— Lisanne

Every book by Daniel Kahneman →

02
How behavioural economics was built

Richard Thaler

American · b. 1945 · Economist

Thaler, a professor at Chicago Booth, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his contributions to behavioural economics. Nudge (2008), written with the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, argued that governments and employers can design choices — default pension enrolment is the famous case — so that people decide better without being forced. Misbehaving (2015) is his own history of the field. He appears as himself in the 2015 film The Big Short.

Ariely and Thaler collect the same kind of everyday mistake, but Thaler asks what institutions should do about it. Misbehaving is the better first read for an Ariely reader: funny, anecdotal and full of experiments, with the added story of how a handful of economists got their profession to take this seriously.

— Lisanne

Every book by Richard Thaler →

03
Persuasion, from the field

Robert Cialdini

American · b. 1945 · Psychologist

Cialdini is Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. For Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) he spent three years undercover in used-car dealerships, fundraising organisations and telemarketing firms, and came out with six principles of influence, among them reciprocity, social proof and scarcity. Pre-Suasion (2016) is about what happens in the moment before a request is made.

The persuasion book that sits next to Predictably Irrational on most shelves, and the comparison is fair: both take a mechanism you think you are immune to and show it working on you. Cialdini is narrower — he only wants to know why people say yes — and more practical, which makes Influence the one people go back to.

— Lisanne

Every book by Robert Cialdini →

04
One irrationality, followed all the way

Barry Schwartz

American · b. 1946 · Psychologist

Schwartz taught psychology at Swarthmore College for most of his career. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004) argues that past a certain point more options make people less satisfied, and borrows Herbert Simon's distinction between “maximizers”, who need the best option, and “satisficers”, who settle for good enough. The jam-tasting study it relies on has had a mixed record since: a 2010 meta-analysis found almost no effect of choice overload, a 2015 one found it appears only under specific conditions.

Ariely's method applied to a single question for a whole book. Where Predictably Irrational moves from one bias to the next, Schwartz stays with choice — jam, pensions, partners — and turns the findings into an argument about how to live. The replication record is a useful reminder to hold the conclusions a little more loosely than he does.

— Lisanne
05
The economist's version of the story

Steven Levitt

American · b. 1967 · Economist

Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2003. Freakonomics (2005), written with the journalist Stephen J. Dubner, applies economic data to questions such as cheating sumo wrestlers and why drug dealers live with their mothers, and was followed by SuperFreakonomics (2009) and Think Like a Freak (2014). Its best-known claim, that legalised abortion lowered US crime rates, was challenged in 2005 by economists who found errors in the original paper; Donohue and Levitt acknowledged the errors and argued that a weaker effect remained.

The same appetite for strange questions and surprising answers, but from data that already exists rather than from the lab. Ariely asks what people do in an experiment; Levitt asks what the records show they did. Read the two side by side and you see both ways the field finds things out, and the ways each can go wrong.

— Lisanne

Every book by Steven Levitt →

06
The story of Kahneman and Tversky

Michael Lewis

American · b. 1960 · Journalist

Lewis is the author of Liar's Poker (1989), Moneyball (2003) and The Big Short (2010). The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2016) is a joint biography of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the two Israeli psychologists whose work made behavioural economics possible, from their army years to their falling-out.

The narrative history of the ideas Ariely popularised, written by the best storyteller in non-fiction. Lewis came to it after readers pointed out that Moneyball was a book about biased judgement without knowing it; The Undoing Project is the origin story, and it is also a book about how two people think together.

— Lisanne

Every book by Michael Lewis →

07
Habits, the practical side

Charles Duhigg

American · b. 1974 · Journalist

Duhigg is a reporter who led the New York Times team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series on Apple and the technology industry. The Power of Habit (2012) explains habits as a loop of cue, routine and reward, with case studies from Alcoa, Target and Alcoholics Anonymous. He followed it with Smarter Faster Better (2016) and Supercommunicators (2024).

For readers who come to Ariely wanting to change something, not only to understand it. Duhigg covers the same territory — behaviour that runs without our noticing — as a journalist rather than an experimenter, building each chapter around a person or a company. It is less surprising than Ariely and more useful.

— Lisanne

Every book by Charles Duhigg →

08
What scarcity does to the mind

Sendhil Mullainathan

Indian-American · Economist

Mullainathan was born in Tamil Nadu, moved to Los Angeles at four, and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002; he is a professor of economics and computer science at MIT. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013), written with the Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir, argues that lacking money or time narrows attention — “tunneling” — and uses up mental “bandwidth”, which leads to worse decisions that keep people short.

The book in this list that takes Ariely's insight furthest in a serious direction. Ariely shows that everyone makes predictable mistakes; Mullainathan and Shafir show that the circumstances of poverty and overload make the same mistakes more likely, and that the cause is the situation, not the person.

— Lisanne
09
Economics for everyday life, in a British voice

Tim Harford

British · b. 1973 · Economist and journalist

Harford writes the “Undercover Economist” column in the Financial Times and has presented BBC Radio 4's statistics programme More or Less since 2007. The Undercover Economist (2005) explains the economics behind coffee prices and supermarkets; How to Make the World Add Up (2020), published in North America as The Data Detective, is about how to read numbers and studies without being fooled. He was appointed OBE in 2019.

The closest match for Ariely's tone: everyday examples, a light touch, a good joke. Harford is more sceptical, though, and How to Make the World Add Up is in part a guide to judging exactly the kind of headline-friendly study that popular behavioural science runs on.

— Lisanne
10
The necessary counterweight

Stuart Ritchie

Scottish · Psychologist

Ritchie is a Scottish psychologist who studied at the University of Edinburgh and lectured at King's College London. Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth (2020) is an account of the replication crisis: p-hacking, unpublished null results, image manipulation, outright fraud, and the incentives that reward them. It was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2021.

The book to read after any of the others on this list. Ritchie explains how striking, story-ready findings get published and repeated before anyone checks them, which is the context for the retractions of Ariely's own papers. It does not make behavioural science less interesting; it makes its readers better at telling which results to trust.

— Lisanne
Every book by Stuart Ritchie →

Where to start if you loved Dan Ariely

If you want the science behind Predictably Irrational, read Daniel Kahneman.

Thinking, Fast and Slow: slower, denser, and the source of most of it.

If you want the stories, read Richard Thaler.

Misbehaving — how behavioural economics was argued into existence.

If you want to use it, read Robert Cialdini.

Influence: six principles, tested in the field.

If you want to know what to trust, read Stuart Ritchie.

Science Fictions, then go back to the others with sharper eyes.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Dan Ariely

Who should I read if I love Dan Ariely?

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow first, since it explains the research most of Ariely's books build on. Then Richard Thaler's Misbehaving for the history of behavioural economics, Robert Cialdini's Influence for persuasion, and Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice for a whole book on one irrationality. Tim Harford is the closest in tone, and Stuart Ritchie's Science Fictions explains how to judge findings like these.

What books are like Predictably Irrational?

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011), Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008), Influence by Robert Cialdini (1984) and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005) are the closest: each explains a surprising pattern in everyday behaviour through studies or data, written for a general reader.

Is Dan Ariely's research reliable?

Parts of it have been retracted. A 2012 paper in PNAS that Ariely co-wrote with Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman, whose insurance-mileage field experiment he supervised, was retracted in 2021 after the Data Colada researchers showed the data had been fabricated; Ariely said he had not fabricated them. In September 2026 Psychological Science retracted his 2002 procrastination study with Klaus Wertenbroch after Data Colada found signs the data had been tampered with; Wertenbroch requested the retraction, and Ariely said the data “cannot be trusted”. Many of the effects in his books rest on other researchers' work too, so it is worth reading him alongside Kahneman and a sceptic such as Stuart Ritchie.

What should I read after Thinking, Fast and Slow?

Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project (2016) tells the story of Kahneman's partnership with Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler's Misbehaving (2015) follows what economists did with their findings. Noise (2021), by Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, is his last book and the natural sequel.

What is the difference between behavioural economics and psychology?

Behavioural economics uses findings from psychology to correct the economic model of people as perfectly rational decision-makers. Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists; Thaler, Levitt and Mullainathan are economists; Ariely works across both. In practice the popular books overlap almost completely, and the difference is mostly in which department the author belongs to.

Are there books about Dan Ariely's own subject, dishonesty?

Ariely's own The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty (2012) is the main one, though the retracted 2012 paper is part of its evidence. Stuart Ritchie's Science Fictions (2020) covers dishonesty from the other side: how fraud and bias get into published research.

Footnotes

  1. Dan Ariely — Wikipedia
  2. What I learned about motivation as a teenage burn victim — PBS NewsHour
  3. A big study on honesty turns out to be based on fake data — Reason
  4. Procrastination study by Duke's Dan Ariely retracted — Retraction Watch
  5. Richard H. Thaler biography — Chicago Booth
  6. Robert Cialdini — Wikipedia
  7. The Paradox of Choice — Wikipedia
  8. Science Fictions — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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