Social Psychology Recommended Literature

Reading list current as of 25 March 2026.

• Social Psychology: Goals in Interaction — Kenrick, Neuberg & Cialdini (5th ed., 2010, Pearson). The core textbook for the course, organising social behaviour around a set of fundamental motivational goals such as self-protection, affiliation, and status. Each chapter asks what goal a given behaviour serves, giving the book an unusually coherent theoretical spine. Covers conformity and obedience, attribution, prejudice, aggression, and group processes. ISBN: 978-0-205-72502-1.
• Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience — Purves et al. (2nd ed., 2013, Sinauer). A comprehensive introduction to the neural bases of perception, memory, emotion, and decision-making. For this course the most relevant chapters are those on the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex, and the neural basis of social cognition including theory of mind and the default mode network. ISBN: 978-0-87893-573-4.
• Homicide — Daly & Wilson (1988, de Gruyter). An evolutionary analysis of lethal violence using homicide data from across cultures and history. Daly and Wilson show that patterns of violence — who kills whom and under what circumstances — are explicable in terms of evolved psychological mechanisms around kinship, status competition, and reproductive conflict. Read alongside the aggression content in Kenrick for a contrast between proximate and ultimate explanations. ISBN: 0-202-01177-1.
• Social Neuroscience: Key Readings — Cacioppo & Berntson, eds. (2005, Psychology Press). An edited collection of landmark papers that established social neuroscience as a field, covering topics from the neural correlates of self-referential processing to the role of the anterior cingulate cortex in social exclusion, oxytocin and trust, and the neurobiology of empathy. The editorial introductions to each section are especially useful for contextualising the papers. ISBN: 1-84169-099-6.

Reading list current as of 18 November 2025.

• Social Psychology — Myers & Twenge (Evergreen Edition, 2025 release; McGraw Hill). One of the most widely adopted social psychology textbooks in the world, covering attitudes, conformity, persuasion, aggression, attraction, altruism, and intergroup relations in a comprehensive chapter-by-chapter format. The Evergreen format means the edition receives rolling content updates, so the 2025 release includes recent research on social media effects and replication-crisis debates. ISBN: 978-1-266-81053-4.