Reading List

Curated readings that bridge academic work to disciplined practice. This list prioritizes rigorous measurement, individual differences (psychometrics), and field validation over generic behavioral economics.

Psychometrics & Personality Science #

Understanding the stable traits that drive individual behavior.

• Nettle: Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are. Why: The best accessible introduction to the Big Five and the evolutionary basis of personality traits. Essential for “Worldview Analysis.”
• Lee & Ashton: The H Factor of Personality. Why: Introduces the HEXACO model, adding Honesty-Humility to the Big Five. Critical for understanding trust and cooperation behaviors.
• Robins et al.: Handbook of Research Methods in Personality Psychology. Why: The definitive reference for measuring individual differences scientifically, not via pop-psych quizzes.
• Wright: Practical Psychometrics. Why: A guide to actually building valid measurement tools (surveys, scales) rather than “cosmopolitan quiz” style assessments.

User Research & Data Analysis #

Validating problems and observing behavior in the wild.

• Gerber & Green: Field Experiments. Why: The gold standard on causal inference. How to know if your intervention actually caused the behavior change.
• Hubbard: How to Measure Anything. Why: Practical quantification. Teaches how to measure “intangibles” like risk, quality, and value.
• Sauro & Lewis: Quantifying the User Experience. Why: rigorous statistical methods for user research. Moves beyond “5 users said X” to confidence intervals and benchmarks.
• Tullis & Albert: Measuring the User Experience. Why: The handbook for collecting, analyzing, and presenting usability metrics.
• Hall: Just Enough Research. Why: A practical guide to fitting rigorous inquiry into fast-paced product cycles without sacrificing validity.
• Portigal: Interviewing Users. Why: The definitive guide to the “Problem Examination” phase-how to get past polite answers to uncover real compensatory behaviors.

Use these as a starting point. The goal is to build a toolkit of measurement and matching, not persuasion.