Behavioural science
On the power, and the limits, of behavioural science as a discipline in its own right.
Behavioural science is just applied common sense with a scientific label.
Behavioural science is a rebranding of psychology that finally gets taken seriously. The rebrand is half of its value.
Sutherland is candid that "behavioural economics" is largely a rebranding of psychology: one that lets people have conversations about human irrationality with audiences who wouldn't otherwise take psychology seriously, which he counts as roughly half the discipline's actual value.
He argues medicine treats this backwards: clinical trials are designed to subtract the placebo effect out of a treatment's measured efficacy so that "the science" is whatever remains, when the psychological component being subtracted might be one of the most powerful and useful parts of the whole effect. He's also concerned with what gets measured versus what matters: invoking Robert McNamara's use of body counts in Vietnam as the canonical example of a metric that was easy to track and catastrophically wrong to optimise for, and arguing any measure that becomes a target eventually stops working as a measure.
A discipline whose most quotable insight is 'we rebranded an old idea so people would finally take it seriously' is vulnerable to the same critique Sutherland applies to marketing everywhere else. Behavioural science's institutional success may itself be a branding triumph as much as a scientific one.
70 verified insights in this theme
70 verified insights in this theme
On the epistemic humility of genuine experts versus the overconfidence of the half-informed.
Rory notes that expertise in statistics correlates with humility about what data can and can't tell you, ahead of a warning about AI's status-quo bias.
Rory answering the second audience question about securing buy-in for hard-to-measure things.
Rory citing Octopus Energy and Shopify's team-based measurement approach.
Rory elaborating on Octopus Energy/Shopify's team-based metrics.
Rory on the unquantifiable elements restaurants intuitively value.
Rory's example of quantification bias applied to HS2.
Following the Churchill salt-shaker story, on why psychology's fuzziness is also its strength.
Rory explaining a founding principle of Ogilvy's behavioral science practice.
Rory on neurodiversity and social science, citing Helen Taylor's research.
Rory citing Helen Taylor's thesis on neurodiversity, which he endorses.
Explaining he has no formal behavioral science qualifications, comparing himself to Darwin.
On the insurance salesman's 'go and sit down' anecdote.
On why he moved into formal behavioural science.
On what direct marketing teaches about human behavior.
Rory on why behavioral science matters for financial advisers selling deferred-reward products like pensions.
Using a detective-work analogy to criticize treating only peer-reviewed evidence as usable, as some COVID-era 'follow the science' commentary implied.
On why behavioral science succeeds where marketing jargon fails at persuading non-marketers.
Critiquing over-reliance on single evolutionary-psychology explanations for behavior.
Offering an alternative explanation to a purely evolutionary-psychology account of infidelity data.
Opening qualification to the essay's central claim that everything is BS.
On epistemic humility in behavioral science and why experimentation matters.
Opening his CERTAMENTE talk by drawing a parallel between medicine's treatment of the placebo effect and marketing's treatment of perceived value.
Critiquing government and business's obsession with measurable, objective metrics over subjective experience.
Introducing the McNamara fallacy as an example of quantitative bias leading to catastrophic misjudgment.
Explaining why the Vietnam War's kill-count metric backfired as a strategic measure.
Explaining why the lumen, unlike watts, is calibrated to human visual perception rather than raw physical output.
Questioning why medicine subtracts out the placebo effect instead of trying to maximize it.
Closing callback to the talk's title, summarizing its central claim.
Responding to the tension between Nassim Taleb's skepticism of social science and Rory's own career in behavioural science.
Distinguishing social science's value as widening the range of causal explanations, not producing physics-like laws.
Introducing his 'rigorous but wrong' framework for why businesses avoid psychological explanations.
Contrasting behavioral science's messiness with the tidy predictability businesses prefer.
Reframing free markets as an experiment discovering what people really want, rather than an efficiency machine.
Contrasting how quickly a price cut gets approved versus how hard a creative idea has to fight for approval.
On testing the paradox of choice on an airline's website.
Closing thesis statement of the essay.
Describing consumer capitalism as a natural laboratory of behavioural anomalies.
Warning about the asymmetric risk businesses perceive between illogical and unimaginative decisions.
Summing up his advice on how marketers should treat behavioral science findings.
A dry aside about statistical significance while describing early experimentation with color-coded pill packaging.
Reframing consumer capitalism itself, in contrast to viewing it purely as wealth generation.
Citing George Loewenstein's framing of humans' drive to resolve ambiguity, after the McGurk effect demo.
Introducing satisficing as a decision strategy under imperfect information, ahead of the darts analogy.
Setting up the talk's core claim about the future source of 'moonshot' innovation.
Closing the talk by arguing behavioral science is ancient wisdom now given an evolutionary explanation.
Opening definition of behavioral economics at the start of the IPIA keynote.
Framing the two disciplines needed to explain the anomalies just described.
Explaining candidly why behavioral economics succeeds in business settings where 'psychology' alone would be dismissed.
Arguing that many good marketing ideas historically failed to gain traction for lack of a scientific vocabulary to defend them.
Closing his talk with the story of Patrick Matthew, whose early description of evolution was buried in an appendix about growing trees for the Navy.
Explaining why organizations outsource decisions to models and bureaucracies to avoid personal blame for bad outcomes.
Concluding a passage on bank architecture, taxi loyalty, and reputational signaling as underexplored instinctive competencies.
Arguing that economics borrows the false certainty of Newtonian physics for a domain that behaves more like weather.
Arguing that binary rules stick better than quantitative recommendations because they require no ongoing self-control.
Summarizing Karl Popper's distinction, used to argue that not everything should be treated as precisely measurable.
Drawing out the talk's central claim after describing the Austrian economists' view that economics should be subordinate to psychology.
Introducing Kahneman's distinction between experience and memory, illustrated by colonoscopy studies.
Introducing his 'trifecta' framework of technology, economics, and psychology, arguing the most interesting progress happens at their intersection.
Extending his critique of economists to engineers, arguing both groups chase neat mathematical models for professional advancement.
Applying Karl Popper's clouds-and-clocks distinction to explain why treating human behavior like physics leads to bad decisions.
Crediting Joel Spolsky's blog as an early influence on his interest in behavioral economics.
On behavioral economics giving marketing a scientifically validated vocabulary.
On why behavioral economics doesn't offer one unified theory of human behavior.
Opening argument about the imbalance created by digital and engineering culture outpacing psychological understanding in business.
Criticizing business schools' devotion to elegant mathematical models over messier psychological reality.
Explaining why splitting an antibiotics course into differently-colored pills improved completion rates.
Explaining the thinking behind a Westpac impulse-saving app that let users save five dollars with a single button press.
Citing neuroscientist Nick Chater's experiments on the absence of an objective value scale in the brain.
Generalizing from the inoculation-incentive example (Esther Duflo's lentils) to a broader behavioral-economics principle.