dangerous minds. rory sutherland, vice chairman, ogilvy group
TRANSCRIPT
The third eye….(or what happens when n=millions)
How digital media and behavioural data might finally provide us with a robust way of understanding human behaviour.
@rorysutherland
How economists* pretend it works
* Business executives and civil servants are more guilty than economists in this respect
“Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution”
(Trivers 1976/2006)
Heuristics
sn’t more information always better? In economics, Nobel
prizes are regularly awarded for work that assumes that people
make decisions as if they had perfect information and could
compute the optimal solution for the problem at hand. But how do
real people make good decisions under the usual conditions of
little time and scarce information? Consider how players catch a
ball—in baseball, cricket, or soccer. It may seem that they would
have to solve complex differential equations in their heads to
predict the trajectory of the ball. In fact, players use a simple
heuristic. When a ball comes in high, the player fixates the ball and
starts running. The heuristic is to adjust the running speed so that
the angle of gaze remains constant —that is, the angle between
the eye and the ball. The player can ignore all the information
necessary to compute the trajectory, such as the ball’s initial
velocity, distance, and angle, and just focus on one piece of
nformation, the angle of gaze.
Gerd Gigerenzer
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Reading List
Kahneman - Thinking Fast & Slow
Kurzban - Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite
Seabright - The Company of Strangers
Haidt - The Righteous Mind
Sutherland (Stuart) - Irrationality
Frank - The Darwin Economy
Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational
Thaler & Sunstein - Nudge
Kenrick & Griskevicius - The Rational Animal
@rorysutherland / @ogilvychange