10 Best Books on Human Psychology in India 2021 (The Art of War, The Psychology of Money, and more)

In this 2012 book by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the author explains the two ways a human mind thinks - fast and slow. He talks about the capabilities and consequences of fast thinking, with its faults and biases. The book also details about the more logical and deliberative way of thinking, called slow thinking.

This book engages the reader in a conversation about how we think. It makes the reader more conscious about his style of thinking and know various aspects of it. The beauty of this book lies in its simplicity. It reveals and teaches about the right and wrong occasions to trust our instincts.

It covers both business and personal decision making and enlightens us about guarding against mental glitches. This book is extremely popular among business managers and leaders, mainly because of its focus on making choices and benefits of slow thinking.

This is one of the best selling books from last year. The author, Morgan Housel, through 19 short stories, tries to explain how people's behaviour affects the way they invest and make money. The book focuses on people who make mathematical calculations on a spreadsheet before investing money and others who invest using emotions.

A great chunk of this book is also dedicated to managing human greed - an unavoidable emotion. The benefits of compound interest, lessons from some of the wealthiest people in the world, and gaining peace of mind by having money are some other important notes this book hits.

All in all, it is a great read for people who want to multiply their money by investing it right. It is a great book even for people who wish to start investing and multiplying their money. The message, in a nutshell, is that you need to understand the human psyche to understand the art of making money.

The Art of War is a world-renowned book by a Chinese army general Sun Tzu. He lived about 2500 years ago and wrote a manuscript on military strategy based on Chinese warfare and military thought. The reason this book finds a mention in our list of the best books on human psychology is that we can perceive war as a metaphor for life in general and learn from military strategies.

All the militaries across the world have used Sun Tzu's directives, and civilizations have adapted these techniques in business, politics, and everyday life. This book's teachings are like Game Theory, which can help you gain advantage over your competition in a boardroom, market, or a battlefield alike.

Charles Duhigg received enormous accolades for his life-changing book called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do and How to Change. It is filled with anecdotes that take us to the root cause of habits. When these habits are changed, the working of the brain changes fundamentally. It enables you to focus on patterns that shape all aspects of your lives.

Duhigg, through this book, brought to life a completely new understanding of human nature by decoding some scientific, marketing, and other discoveries. If you are struggling to change your bad habits, then this book will certainly wake you up from your slumber and get you working. The author also describes how neuroscientists explore the working of habits in the human brain.

We all wish to change for the better and keep waiting for a miracle to happen. If you wish to exercise regularly, lose excess weight, become more productive, build your own company, or bring a social change, the solution lies in understanding how habits work.

Sigmund Freud is known as the father of modern psychology and psychoanalysis. Written in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams delves into the importance of dreams in order to tap the subconscious and unconscious. He felt that dreams represent the hidden fulfillment of our unconscious wishes. 

Freud was known to treat his patients by making them write the dreams they had every day. This theory received some slack by his contemporaries but today, this same concept has transformed into what is called the Oedipus Complex. 

Humans have always been fascinated by dreams, and Freud gives the dreams a context and purpose. He uses many hypothesis as well as proven concepts to form a relation between dreams and desires. This is a great read if you are struggling with what you want from life.

People, in general, are afraid of change, so much so that some people even find it frightening. It is not that we do not want change; we are just too scared to leave our bubble of comfort. The changes that we seek may be personal, professional, social, or others. In this book, the authors compare the human mind to two entities - the animal mind, called the elephant, and the logical mind, called the rider.

This analogy helps us understand that the elephant loves sticking to bad habits and is mostly instinctive in his actions. However, the rider is the planner and thinker, who is concerned about the future. The rider wants to stop eating junk food and sleep on time. The elephant and the rider are in constant dissent, and the elephant wins most of the time because the other thing is hard.

The secret to making this "switch" is understanding this relationship between our primitive and intellectual mind. This books also gives many illustrations and real-life examples to show how switching to the rider brain lets you become more productive and resolute in life.

Emotional Quotient, as the author Daniel Goleman calls it, is a term that quantifies the emotional side of the human brain. The author uses the concepts of psychology and neuroscience to delve into the rational and emotional sides of the brain. 

He talks about the skills of emotional intelligence that can help us become successful in relationships, work, and physical fitness. Having a high IQ does not guarantee happiness and success. Also, the IQ is largely developed in the first few years of life. 

However, emotional intelligence is not determined early in life; it evolves over time and depends on our surroundings. Psychologists believe that having a high EQ is more imp ortant than a high IQ as the former can create a more civil society.

Carl Gustav Jung is one of the most popular names in psychology. He wrote this particular book before he passed away in 1961, and it contains his conversations with his colleague Aniela Jaffé, with whom he collaborated to prepare a text-based on these conversations.

This book is a biography of Jung and describes his journey from a child to an older man. He talks about how his experiences, dreams, and interpretations brought him to self-realization. This book gives great insights into the mind of a person who committed his entire life to understand the human mind. 

He also talks about his travels, interest in symbology, etc. Even today, Jung's work is admired by modern psychologists and psychiatrists. This book subtly gives an idea that reason and intellectual conception are not the only reasons for action in this world. 

Philp Zimbardo is a renowned psychologist and is best known for his "Stanford Prison Experiment." the Lucifer Effect explores the situations in which good people do bad things - something like Breaking Bad, maybe? This book presents amazing food for thought about what is the line that separates good from evil. 

Zimbardo, in this book, tells the full story of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a group of college students was randomly divided into guards and inmates. It took only a week for the study to be abandoned as the guards started becoming brutal, and the prisoners broke down emotionally. 

He uses this thought experiment to show how a good person indulges in corporate malfeasance or how an upstanding American soldier wreaks havoc in Iraq. Thus, the notion that a bad individual contaminates the system is actually the other way round.

Jordan Peterson rose to stardom with his book 12 Rules for Life, but he wrote Maps of Meaning many years before his international fame. This book is a great piece of work in understanding how different cultures formulate their own belief systems. He finds many parallels among the beliefs of the various cultures and civilizations of the world. 

This book forms a connection between modern neuropsychology and the long-standing religious stories. Peterson argues that humans experience the world's reality through action composed of known territory, unknown territory, and the individual. 

He also talks about how behaviour and representation give a person a worldview. For example, the various Gods and demi-Gods in different cultures represent some human emotion or control. It is a fascinating read, which some might find a little complicated.