I am often asked to recommend books that will help readers to better understand the socionomic thinking behind my blog posts. In the past year my friend Bob Prechter has published three books on the topic. While I am a heavily-biased reviewer of these books, I would encourage you to add them to your reading list as we head into 2018. In fact, I would strongly recommend that you read the books as a trilogy as the series enables you to see clear mood-driven behavioral parallels vividly across finance, economics, politics, social trends and culture. One the things that I find so interesting and compelling about socionomic thinking is how mood not only transcends everything we do, but it does so simultaneously. What Bob’s new trilogy shows is how rich the mosaic of all these behavioral tiles is, especially at major extremes in mood.

Bob’s first book, The Socionomic Theory of Finance, focuses on the role of unconscious mood in financial and investing decision making, and challenges the conventional thinking of most economists and market pundits. If you want to see how academics and many in the financial media routinely get cause and effect backwards, this book is for you. And Chapter 14, "The Economic-Socionomic Spectrum of Markets," is a must-read, too. Bob’s notion of a continuum from utility goods to investments is particularly thought-provoking. Bob's other two books, Socionomic Studies of Society and Culture and Socionomic Causality in Politics, look at a broad range of specific actions, from the popularity of car colors to authoritarianism, and show how these fluctuate with changes in social mood.

Unlike silo-ed social scientists, Bob and his colleagues at the Socionomics Institute weave together psychology, economics, sociology, linguistics and history to show not only how our mood impacts our actions, but how mood impacts ALL of our actions simultaneously, too. We act as we feel not in just one way but in all ways at once.

I believe that for today’s investors seeing these mood-driven behavioral linkages is critical. For example, recently I wrote about Beatlemania and Bitcoin. On the surface these two things would appear to have little in common. Behaviorally, though, and as Bob's books help to explain, they are identical. If history rhymes, Bitcoin mania is likely to mark the very end of the post-banking crisis rally just like Beatlemania marked the very top of the stock market in early 1966. Manias reflect the extreme confidence that not only mark market peaks, but which precedes major declines in mood leading to dramatic – and simultaneous - political, social and economic upheaval.

Mark Twain suggested that "history rhymes" and Bob’s trilogy does a fabulous job of helping curious readers see why. While our means of expressing mood may have evolved over time, our underlying behavioral traits never really change.

On college campuses today, professionals in the hard sciences have seen the benefits that come from integrating chemistry, physics, biology and engineering. Socionomics takes that same integrated approach as it explores human behavior. As more and more researchers come to realize the role of our unconscious mood-driven minds in how we vote, what we tweet and what and how we eat, I expect that many of Bob’s findings over the past 35 years will be validated by researchers. You don’t need to wait for that. Bob’s new trilogy is presenting the future of social science today.

Whether your focus is investing, politics, marketing or business strategy, Bob’s new books will help you to better understand the crazy world around us and to take advantage of the opportunities that are out there.

Peter Atwater is the President of Financial Insyghts and an adjunct professor at The College of William & Mary and The University of Delaware. The author of "Moods and Markets," he writes and speaks frequently on the role of confidence in economic, political, social and cultural decision making.