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

All models are wrong, but some of them are useful.

All models are wrong, but some of them are dangerous.

Technology Psychology

Economics

The sweet spot

How it should work.

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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David Rock's SCARF model

• Status

• Certainty

• Autonomy

• Relatedness

• Fairness

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