Alchemy Quotes

“The more reputational capital a seller stands to lose, the more confident I am in their quality control. When people snarkily criticise brand preference with the phrase, ‘you’re just paying for the name’, it seems perfectly reasonable to reply, ‘Yes, and what’s wrong with that?”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“My late mother knew absolutely nothing about cars, but had an eagle eye for people.* It would have been interesting to set her the task of buying ten cars based on her instincts about the people selling them, while at the same time tasking ten automotive engineers with acquiring ten cars at auction. I’m confident the cars my mother bought would have been every bit as reliable as the cars chosen by the engineers, perhaps more so.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“At some point, we have to ask a vital question: do these various things work despite the fact that they are illogical, or do they work precisely because they are? And if our unconscious instincts are programmed to respond to and to generate behaviours precisely because they deviate from economic optimality, what might be the evolutionary reason for this? It seems rather like the lesson that is taught to aspiring journalists: ‘Dog Bites Man’ is not news, but ‘Man Bites Dog’ is. Meaning is disproportionately conveyed by things that are unexpected or illogical, while narrowly logical things convey no information at all. And this brings us full circle, to the explanation of costly signalling. Part 5: Satisficing”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Imagine an alien species with the power to fall asleep at will – they would regard human bedtime behaviour as essentially ridiculous. ‘Rather than just going to sleep, they go through a strange religious ritual,’ an alien anthropologist would remark. ‘They turn off lights, reduce all noise to a minimum and then remove the seven decorative cushions which for no apparent reason are placed at the head of the bed.* Then they lie in silence and darkness, in the hope that sleep descends upon them. And rather than simply waking up when they wish, they program a strange machine which sounds a bell at an appointed time, to nudge them back into consciousness. This seems ridiculous.’ Similarly, imagine an alien species that could decide how happy it wanted to be. They would regard the entire human entertainment industry as a spectacular economic waste.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“In the words of Jonathan Haidt,* ‘The conscious mind thinks it’s the Oval Office, when in reality it’s the press office.’ By this he means that we believe we are issuing executive orders, while most of the time we are actually engaged in hastily constructing plausible post-rationalisations to explain decisions taken somewhere else, for reasons we do not understand. But the fact that we can deploy reason to explain our actions post-hoc does not mean that it was reason that decided on that action in the first place, or indeed that the use of reason can help obtain it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Think about it. There are some phrases that just wouldn’t appear in the English language:* ‘I chose not to be angry.’ ‘He plans to fall in love at 4.30pm tomorrow.’ ‘She decided that she was no longer to feel uneasy in his presence.’ ‘From that moment on, she determined no longer to be afraid of heights.’* ‘He decided to like spiders and snakes.’ Things like this are not under our direct control, but are rather the product of instinctive and automatic emotions. There is a good evolutionary reason why we are imbued with these strong, involuntary feelings: feelings can be inherited, whereas reasons have to be taught, which means that evolution can select for emotions much more reliably than for reasons. To ensure your survival, it is much more reliable for evolution to give you an instinctive fear of snakes at birth than relying on each generation to teach its offspring to avoid them. Things like this aren’t in our software – they are in our hardware.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The technology involved,* given the economics of mass production, would have added no more than a few pounds to the final purchase price, so why would you not add this significant extra?* Any ‘rational’ person would have advised Morita to go with the engineers’ advice, but according to multiple accounts, Morita vetoed the recording button. This defies all conventional economic logic, but it does not defy psycho-logic. Morita thought the presence of a recording function would confuse people about what the new device was for. Was it for dictation? Should I record my vinyl record collection onto cassette? Or should I record live music? In the same way that McDonald’s omitted cutlery from its restaurants to make it obvious how you were supposed to eat its hamburgers, by removing the recording function from Walkmans, Sony produced a product that had a lower range of functionality, but a far greater potential to a change behaviour.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“To anyone born after 1975 there is nothing outlandish about people walking around or sitting on a train wearing headphones, but in the late 1970s this was a very odd behaviour indeed; comparable to the use of an early cellphone in the late 1980s, when to use one in public carried a high risk of ridicule.* In market research, the Walkman aroused very little interest and quite a lot of hostility. ‘Why would I want to walk about with music playing in my head?’ was a typical response, but Morita ignored it. The request for the Walkman had initially come from the 70-year-old Ibuka, who wanted a small device to allow him to listen to full-length operas on flights between Tokyo and the US.*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The lionfish comes from the tropical waters around Indonesia. Though beautiful to look at, it is a voracious predator of other fish, and is able to eat as many as 30 in half an hour. Furthermore, one female lionfish can produce over two million eggs per year, which was a particular problem in the Caribbean, where it has no natural predators. The decimation of local species threatened the environment and the economics of Colombia, much of which depends on fishing. It was also destroying the ecology of coral reefs. This was when some colleagues of mine borrowed an idea from Frederick the Great; Ogilvy & Mather in Bogotá decided that the solution was to create a predator for the lionfish – humans. The simplest and most cost-effective way to rid Colombia’s waters of lionfish was to encourage people to eat them, which would encourage anglers to catch them. The agency recruited the top chefs in Colombia and encouraged them to create lionfish recipes for the best restaurants. As they explained, a lionfish is poisonous on the outside but delicious on the inside, so they created an advertising campaign titled ‘Terribly Delicious’. Working with the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, they generated a cultural shift by turning the invader into an everyday food. Lionfish soon appeared in supermarkets. Some 84 per cent of Colombians are Roman Catholic, so they asked the Catholic Church to recommend lionfish to their congregations on Fridays and during Lent. That additional element – recruiting the Catholic Church – was the true piece of alchemy. Today, indigenous fish species are recovering and the lionfish population is in decline.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Once you can casually ask, ‘Who’s going to be the DD on Friday?’ it’s easy to see how this behaviour becomes much easier to adopt, and it’s also much easier for the sober person to defend their sobriety when anyone offers them a drink. In Belgium and the Netherlands, he (or she) simply explains I can’t drink tonight, I’m Bob’ – a Dutch acronym* for Bewust Onbeschonken Bestuurder or ‘deliberately sober driver’. In both cases, creating a name for a behaviour implicitly creates a norm for it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Klawe, a computer scientist and mathematician, was appointed president of Harvey Mudd College in California. At the time, only 10 per cent of the college’s computer science majors were women. The department devised a plan, aimed at luring in female students and making sure they actually enjoyed their computer science initiation, in the hopes of converting them to majors. A course previously entitled ‘Introduction to programming in Java’ was renamed ‘Creative approaches to problem solving in science and engineering using Python’.* The professors further divided the class into groups – Gold for those with no coding experience and Black, for those with some coding experience.* They also implemented Operation Eliminate the Macho Effect, in which males who showed off in class were taken aside and told to desist. Almost overnight, Harvey Mudd’s introductory computer science course went from being the most despised required course to the absolute favourite.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“But surely this kind of alchemy no longer works today? Well, have you ever eaten Chilean sea bass?* It is the product of a particular sort of alchemy, ‘The Alchemy of Semantics’. The $20 slice of fish that graces plates in high-end restaurants under the name ‘Chilean sea bass’ actually comes from a fish that for many years was known as the Patagonian toothfish. No one is going to pay $20 for a plate of Patagonian toothfish – call it Chilean sea bass, however, and the rules change. An American fish wholesaler called Lee Lentz had the idea, even though, strictly speaking, most of the catch doesn’t come from Chile and the toothfish isn’t even related to the bass.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“If you think that’s impossible, look at the paper money in your wallet or purse; the value is exclusively psychological. Value resides not in the thing itself, but in the minds of those who value it. You can therefore create (or destroy) value it in two ways – either by changing the thing or by changing minds about what it is.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Has business abandoned its traditional and socially useful role, where competing businesses tested divergent theories of how best to satisfy customer needs, with the market passing judgement on their efforts? It sometimes seems to have been reduced to a kind of monotheistic religion of efficiency where, provided you can recite the approved managerial mantras about economies of scale and cost savings to your financial overlords, no further questions will be asked.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“One astonishing possible explanation for the function of reason only emerged about ten years ago: the argumentative hypothesis* suggests reason arose in the human brain not to inform our actions and beliefs, but to explain and defend them to others. In other words, it is an adaptation necessitated by our being a highly social species. We may use reason to detect lying in others, to resolve disputes, to attempt to influence other people or to explain our actions in retrospect, but it seems not to play the decisive role in individual decision-making.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Some evolutionary psychologists, most notably Robert Kurzban, believe that racial prejudice is a relatively weak force in human psychology since for most of evolutionary history we wouldn’t have encountered people of a different ethnicity. We might, rather, be heavily predisposed to attaching ‘outsider status’ to people who speak with a different accent to us, since such distinctions would have been experienced more frequently. Coming from a country that historically was obsessed with accents,* this does seem worth investigating. Would a privately educated Nigerian be at a disadvantage in seeking a job in London in competition with a white Liverpudlian with a strong Scouse accent? I rather doubt it. Kurzban’s work suggests that prejudice depends on context; we may be more prone to ascribe ‘outsider status’ to someone of a different ethnic background, but this does not mean that we cannot easily adopt anyone of any ethnic background into an ‘in group’ in a different setting.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Real excellence can come in odd packaging. Nassim Nicholas Taleb applies this rule to choosing a doctor: you don’t want the smooth, silver-haired patrician who looks straight out of central casting – you want his slightly overweight, less patrician but equally senior colleague in the ill-fitting suit. The former has become successful partly as a result of his appearance, the latter despite it.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Imagine you came home to find a dog turd on the floor of your kitchen; you would find it repellent, and would remove it immediately. Having disposed of it, you would wipe the floor with water and detergent, and if I asked you why you were doing those things, you would answer ‘because it’s unhygienic, of course; it’s a source of germs’. But here’s the thing; an early Victorian would have experienced exactly the same emotions and performed exactly the same actions, but they didn’t know about germs. They were, technically speaking, irrational in their dislike of faeces, which was ‘purely emotional’. Nowadays, if someone started flinging faeces around, we would describe him as a public-health hazard, while in the eighteenth century they would have called the practice ‘ungodly’ and in the fifteenth they might have burned him at the stake. So the dislike of faeces was not originally based on sound reasoning – it was rather a sound instinct the reason for which had not yet been discovered.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“You will never uncover unconscious motivations unless you create an atmosphere in which people can ask apparently fatuous questions without fear of shame. ‘Why do people hate waiting for an engineer’s appointment?’ ‘Why do people not like it when their flight is delayed?’ ‘Why do people hate standing on trains?’ All of these questions seem facile – and because of this, our rationalising brains find it dangerously easy to come up with a plausible answer. But just because there is a rational answer to something, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a more interesting, irrational answer to be found in the unconscious.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“I am willing to bet that there are ten times as many people on the planet who are currently being paid to debate why people prefer Coke or Pepsi than there are being paid to ask questions like ‘Why do people request a doctor’s appointment?’, ‘Why do people go to university?’ or ‘Why do people retire?’ The answers to these last three questions are believed to be rational and self-evident, but they are not.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Using this as a metaphor, I would like to see the improvement we have enjoyed in food over the last three decades applied to other fields. It is only when we abandon a narrow logic and embrace an appreciation of psycho-logical value, that we can truly improve things. Once we are honest about the existence of unconscious motivations, we can broaden our possible solutions. It will free us to open up previously untried spaces for experimentation in resolving practical problems if we are able to discover what people really, really want,* rather than a) what they say they want or b) what we think they should want.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“The reason we don’t always behave in a way which corresponds with conventional ideas of rationality is not because we are silly: it is because we know more than we know we know. I did not decide to travel to the airport by back roads because I had calculated the level of variance in journey time – I did it instinctively, and was only aware of my unconscious reasoning in retrospect. ‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing,’ as Pascal put it.*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“So there are logical problems, such as building a bridge. And there are psycho-logical ones: whether to paint the lines on the road or not. The rules for solving both are different; just as I make a distinction between nonsense and non-sense, I also use a hyphen to distinguish between logical and psycho-logical thinking. The logical and the psycho-logical approaches run on different operating systems and require different software, and we need to understand both. Psycho-logic isn’t wrong, but it cares about different things and works in a different way to logic. Because logic is self-explanatory, our preference is to use it in all social and institutional settings, even where it has no place. The result is that we end up using inappropriate software for the operating system, neglecting the psycho-logical approach.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak. Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“This book is not an attack on the many healthy uses of logic or reason, but it is an attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale before it can even be considered or attempted. If this book provides you with nothing else, I hope it gives you permission to suggest slightly silly things from time to time. To fail a little more often. To think unlike an economist. There are many problems which are logic-proof, and which will never be solved by the kind of people who aspire to go to the”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Robert Zion, the social psychologist, once described cognitive psychology as ‘social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero’. The point he was making is that humans are a deeply social species (which may mean that research into human behaviour or choices in artificial experiments where there is no social context isn’t really all that useful). In the real world, social context is absolutely critical. For instance, as the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu observes, gift giving is viewed as a good thing in most human societies, but it only takes a very small change in context to make a gift an insult rather than a blessing; returning a present to the person who has given it to you, for example, is one of the rudest things you can do. Similarly, offering people money when they do something you like makes perfect sense according to economic theory and is called an incentive, but this does not mean you should try to pay your spouse for sex.*”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“In most corporate settings, if you suddenly asked ‘Why do people clean their teeth?’ you would be looked at as a lunatic, and quite possibly unsafe. There is after all an official, approved, logical reason why we clean our teeth: to preserve dental health and reduce cavities or decay. Move on. Nothing to see here. But, as I will explain later in this book, I don’t think that’s the real reason. For instance, if it is, why are 95 per cent of all toothpastes flavoured with mint?”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“And by doing so they launched a soft drinks brand that would indeed go on to be a worthy rival to Coca-Cola: that drink was Red Bull. When I say that Red Bull ‘tastes kind of disgusting’, this is not a subjective opinion.* No, that was the opinion of a wide cross-section of the public. Before Red Bull launched outside of Thailand, where it had originated, it’s widely rumoured that the licensee approached a research agency to see what the international consumer reaction would be to the drink’s taste; the agency, a specialist in researching the flavouring of carbonated drinks, had never seen a worse reaction to any proposed new product.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Heuristics look second-best to people who think all decisions should be optimal. In a world where satisficing is necessary, they are often not only the easiest option but the best.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones. By contrast, it is perfectly possible that conventional market research has, over the past fifty years, killed more good ideas than it has spawned, by obsessing with a false idea of representativeness.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life