Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland

For the last fifty years or so, most issues involving human behaviour or decision-making have been solved by looking through what I call ‘regulation-issue binoculars’. These have two lenses – market research and economic theory – that together are supposed to provide a complete view of human motivation. There’s only one problem: the binoculars are broken. Both the lenses are pretty badly cracked, and they distort our view of every issue. The first lens is market research or, to give it a simpler name, asking people. However, the problem with it is that, if we remember David Ogilvy’s words: ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.’ People simply do not have introspective access to their motivations. The second lens is standard economic theory, which doesn’t ask people what they do and doesn’t even observe what they do. Instead it assumes a narrow and overly ‘rationalistic’ view of human motivation, by focusing on a theoretical, one-dimensional conception of what it believes humans are trying to do. Again, behavioural economics has shown that it provides an incomplete and sometimes misleading view of human behaviour – neither the business nor the policy worlds have paid sufficient attention to the failings of economics and research. Why might this be? Generally, it is safe for anyone making business or policy decisions to act as though everything seen through these binoculars...