Some books for practitioners who want to design good nudges:
- The Person and the Situation. A great starting point on social psychology, and the core ideas have withstood the replication crisis: situational factors are potent and easily overlooked; what matters is not the 'objective' situation but how it is construed; individual and group behaviour are systems in tension.
- Kurt Lewin's Field Theory in Social Science and Principles of Topographical Psychology. Somewhat esoteric but field theory remains the best organising framework for thinking about behaviour. Of someone whose behaviour you want to change, don't ask 'How can I get them to move?', but instead ask 'Why aren't they moving already?'. As with a locked door, so with people.
- Misbehaving. Start with this instead of Nudge (but you've already read Nudge).
- The Design of Everyday Things. The rare book about design that is light on platitudes and heavy on detail. Very useful taxonomies of errors (mistakes vs. slips), and full of psychological insight. Blame stupid environments not stupid people.
- The New Psychology of Leadership. Serves as a very helpful introduction to social identity theory, which has many applications beyond leadership. To succeed leaders need to 'be one of us', to be 'doing it for us', to 'craft a sense of us', and to 'make us matter'.
- The Utopia of Rules. Whatever your views on the correctness of Graeber's wider work, the title essay is an convincing on modern bureaucracies' hostility to humans. Properly contrued, nudging is a broad church, and anarchists are welcome too. Read alongside Kafka's The Castle.
- Instruction to Deliver. Michael Barber's record of getting stuff done in government and 'deliverology'. A useful reference on what it takes to get stuff in government (persistence, guile, more persistence).
- Seeing Like A State. Now a cliché in policy circles, but it's a classic for a reason and a good counterpoint to Barber.
- Systemantics, aka the Systems Bible. Systems, particularly large ones, tend to go wrong. Attempts to fix them tend to make things worse. Becoming a student of systemantics will make you a superforecaster when it comes to major government reforms, new IT systems etc. (hint: predict failure).
- Normal Rationality. Edna Ullman-Margalit remains underrated as a decision theorist. Many decisions are too small (which exact can of soup to pick up in the supermarket) or too large (whether to have a child) for our normal analytical tools. This volume fleshes out a helpful taxonomy - picking vs. choosing; opting, converting, drifting; 2nd-order decisions - for making sense of them.