Seven Books That Explain What Motivates Other People

Other people can be confusing. Even in our closest relationships, loved ones often behave in ways that can seem inexplicable. Why can’t your friend recognize her self-destructive weaknesses? Why do you find your coworker so irritating? Partners persist in misinterpreting each other; voters are convinced that their political opponents are irredeemably wrong—and in these disputes, the other side’s point of view seems not only incorrect but also completely alien. In short, why are other people like that?

We can’t read people’s minds, but we can do the next best thing: read books. Perceptive memoirs or fiction, for example, can help you see the actions of others in a new light. A deep dive into brain science can offer new ways of understanding our fellow humans—as individuals influenced by their upbringing, social networks, and the places they’ve lived. The following selections lay bare the basic mental equipment we all share; they suggest a framework for appreciating different personalities. The most compelling literature can even feel like quality time with someone—the kind that allows their idiosyncrasies to become deeply familiar. These books play their part in unraveling the mysteries of human behavior. Reading them can help you understand the actions of others—and maybe even your own.

Behave yourselfby Robert M. Sapolsky

What happens in our brains before we perform certain actions—movements as small but significant as squeezing a trigger, or as quick and instinctive as touching someone’s arm? In this groundbreaking, 800-page book, Sapolsky, a neurobiologist and primatologist, devotes himself to uncovering why we behave the way we do. And the areas he covers are numerous: Readers get a detailed course in how neurons and neurotransmitters work, the impact of stress on cognition, and the ways in which fetal exposure to certain hormones can shape the brain. But Sapolsky also digresses to discuss the roles of culture and evolution. His goal is to examine humans at “the best and the worst,” and certain key questions recur throughout the book. How does our brain make moral decisions? How should we interpret our tendencies toward violence, hierarchy, and tribalism? And—most importantly—do we have free will? (In his latest—and controversial—book, Specifiedclaims not.) Sapolsky leads us with a comforting verbosity through the labyrinths of overlapping scholarly debates; his prose is rigorous yet surprisingly entertaining. Reading Behave yourself can be like leafing through the instruction manual for our amazing human machinery: the insights it contains are useful, insightful, and important.

Middlemarchby George Eliot

Those seeking a gripping exploration of the human psyche need look no further than this towering classic novel. While most readers would not describe Eliot’s study of a nineteenth-century English provincial town as a work of psychology, it nonetheless examines the intertwined lives of its inhabitants, examining in detail what makes them tick. The cast of characters—including the earnest, generous Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious Dr. Tertius Lydgate—enter into unwise marriages, encounter obstacles to their ambitions, allow their reputations to be tarnished, and become indebted to debts they find it hard to repay. Much of the drama of the novel arises from the mutual misunderstandings that develop between individuals (especially married couples), and Eliot traces in fascinating detail the feelings and thoughts on both sides of the misunderstanding. Even the briefest flash of emotion on a face or the intonation of a phrase can set off a chain of misunderstandings, and the reader is privy to each character’s shortcomings as they form unrealistic expectations and read their own worries into the words of their interlocutors. Complete understanding of others is impossible, the novel suggests. And yet, thanks to Eliot’s acute sensitivity, reading Middlemarch can increase your ability to imagine other people’s states of mind.

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Visible darknessby William Styron

At age 60, Styron fell ill with a severe depression that immobilized him and brought him to the brink of suicide. In this slim book, he attempts to put into words his experience of an illness that is “so mysteriously painful and elusive,” he writes, “that it borders on the impossible to describe.” We get an intimate sense of the illness from its beginnings, when Styron discovered that alcohol—a substance he had “abused for forty years”—suddenly made him nauseous and disgusted. His abstinence began a malaise that culminated in his decision to commit suicide in his Connecticut home, ending only with his later hospitalization and recovery. Sections on the causes of depression and its treatment are elegantly woven into a discussion of suicide, an act that Styron argues “should be no more reprehensible than the victim of terminal cancer.” The depths of depression are almost incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it, but Styron’s rich, precise language allows his readers to understand his suffering and gives us insight into the workings of his mind.

Connectedby Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler

To truly understand people, focus not on individuals or groups, write sociologists Christakis and Fowler. What matters are connections between people: the branching paths that stretch from you and your family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors to, say, Kevin Bacon. The book sketches the surprising ways these social networks affect our behavior, moods, and health, and its conclusions can be stunning. If your best friend’s sister gains weight, for example, you’re likely to gain weight, too, they write. Who we know has a significant impact on whether we smoke, commit suicide, or vote, thanks to our human tendency to copy one another. Happiness and sadness also spread across groups, so that the mood of someone you don’t know can affect your own emotions—even though we often imagine that our internal states are under our personal control. “No man or woman is an island,” the authors write. Their book convincingly argues that our tangled relationships determine almost everything about how our lives turn out—and reminds us that we cannot be meaningfully understood in isolation.

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Milkmanby Anna Burns

Milkman Set in 1970s Northern Ireland during the turmoil—kidnappings, car bombs, and “state renunciants” provide a turbulent backdrop—the narrator paints a chillingly stark portrait of a community consumed by paranoia and violence. When its unnamed narrator appears in public with a menacing figure known only as Milkman, rumors begin to spread that she is his mistress. Never mind that the attentions of Milkman, a high-ranking paramilitary figure who seems to follow her everywhere and make indirect threats, are entirely unwelcome. Where she lives, the narrator tells us, “you made a political statement everywhere you went and everything you did, even if you didn’t mean to.” To protect herself from the rumors and Milkman himself, the narrator is forced to become “a carefully constructed nothingness.” She adopts a blank expression and confides in no one—an emotional state that reflects the hollowed-out hopelessness and self-deception of her neighbors. Burns’s dense, discursive style captures the narrator’s psyche in an intimate way: we feel right there with her as she grapples with the fears, suspicions, and longings she hides from the world, and as she watches an entire city corrode under the pressure.

Personality brokersby Merve Emre

We often speak of “personality types,” and we take for granted that individuals’ innate traits can be categorized, predicted, and analyzed. In this intriguing book, Emre traces the development of this idea by telling the story of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the world’s most popular personality test. Mother-daughter team Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers spent most of the 20th century developing the dichotomies of their system: introversion and extroversion, feeling and thinking, intuition and sensing, judgment and perception. Their story is a strange, sprawling narrative, marked by religious fervor and a fixation on the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, set against the historical backdrop of postwar intellectual work. Emre’s account is infused with a necessary skepticism—the Myers-Briggs system is not supported by scientific research, and its creators were “desperate amateurs” who relied mostly on quixotic faith, she writes. At the same time, he articulates why this framework is so enduring: it provides its adherents with a language for analyzing the dark world of their own and others’ personalities, and many use it to achieve a self-knowledge that can be truly liberating. The quest for self-knowledge, as this book makes clear, is an ongoing one.

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Recovering conversationsby Sherry Turkle

“Face-to-face conversation is the most human—and humanizing—thing we do,” sociologist Turkle writes at the beginning of his insightful 2015 book. Our reliance on digital tools to replace such interactions undermines our ability to engage in deep, open discussions, he argues. Recovering conversations is full of depressing examples of this decline, drawn from countless interviews with teens and young adults, teachers, corporate executives, and families. Parents can’t look up from their phones during family dinners; students struggle to focus and avoid meaningful dialogue in classrooms; professionals have meetings that barely function as meetings because everyone is also checking their email. We’ve replaced conversations with texting, emailing, and posting on social media, Turkle points out, to avoid the boredom, embarrassment, and vulnerability that come with real conversation. Yet this kind of discomfort breeds intimacy—the basis for understanding other people, and therefore for empathy. Turning to those around us, she concludes, is still the best way to understand each other. If you want to know why people behave the way they do, the quickest way to find out is to ask them.