Does science provide any guidance, you may wonder, regarding which kind of self-development books to read? And what does scientific research say about the efficacy of self-development books in general? On this page, we continually discuss and share all the papers and articles we come across.

 

During the initial research phase for finding the distinguishing aspects for books in each topic, we first approached the topics from several angles, such as the categories on publishers’ websites, types of therapy, philosophical schools of thought, as well as some good old intuition. Then, with basic frameworks in place, we began our search for scientific validation of these classifications. But, to our surprise, we couldn’t find that much scientific research about self-development books in general.

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Here's the research we could find:

• Bergsma – Do Self-Help Books Help? (2008)​

• Hart, Ivtzan & Hart – Mind the Gap in Mindfulness Research: A Comparative Account of the Leading Schools of Thought (2013)

• Neville – Helping self-help books: working towards a new research agenda (2012)​

• Wild – Preferences of Self-Help Books and their presumed credibility in the college population (2018)

•  A Randomized Trial of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy andTraditional Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Self-Help Books for Social Anxiety (2020)

• The effectiveness of self-guided interventions in adults with depressive symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis (2024)

 

It’s quite fascinating that relatively little focus of the scientific community has been directed to this topic if you consider that it’s estimated that over 10 billion euros a year are spent on this, well, type of treatment, and that mental health issues aren’t exactly on the decline.

 

There can be several reasons for this and each might be part of the explanation. The simplest possible explanation is that it’s simply overlooked. A lot of research is focused on the efficacy of therapy types to see if they produce significant results. Psychology departments are also branched based on issue types, such as child psychology and clinical psychology. We’ve not come across any university with a branch that has a specific focus on books.

 

Another possible reason why there is little research being conducted about the efficacy of self-development books, is that it’s very difficult to make categorical statements about such books. Whereas therapists often follow protocols of some kind with a little degree of freedom for their own style, self-development books deliberately try to be different from each other – even books that address the same issue from the same point of view. This creates a challenge for researchers because they would have to subjectively group books. Furthermore, since self-development through books is an unguided approach, a lot depends on the reader’s ability to grasp the essence of the book. Some tips for how to do this well, are provided in our guide “How to Read a Self-Development book”. Besides reading ability, discipline also greatly impacts the results from reading a self-development book. Without discipline, even the efficacy of great, suitable books will be low.

 

An entirely different explanation might be that it’s all just about money. In today’s world, universities largely depend on funding from companies who like to see this money being funneled into research topics that benefit their bottom-line profits. Meaning that there won’t be that much funding for research about self-development books until some of the publishers start providing it. Yet, it’s hard to imagine a publisher doing so, for it would probably benefit their competitors just as much while they’d be paying for it.​​​

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To answer the question if self-development books work, scientific research seems to say it does. In particular when someone executes more than 80% of the assignments in the book. It also suggests that some guidance with self help can increase the results, as it helps with focus, accountability and reflection.

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