We live in a logic-obsessed world, from computer modelling of the economy to businesses run by spreadsheets. But we also know, from decades of behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology research, humans are not robots. The social world is not a machine but a complex system. In Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense, Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and columnist for The Spectator, explains how to crack the magic underlying our humanity.
Humans evolved to justify their instinctive decisions to others, not to prove what is right and wrong. Those who could defend their actions were more likely to survive. We use reason sparingly, selectively and self-servingly. We search for evidence to support our existing world view. Consequently, there is a big gap between our actions and how we justify them. As David Ogilvy said: ‘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.’ To be successful you must put aside pure rationality to discover the real ‘why’ of human action, not the post-rationalised ‘why’.
Our lack of pure rationality does not make us stupid. In fact, we often act in seemingly irrational ways because we instinctively understand, or have come to discover, our deeper goals and how to achieve them. Sutherland calls this ‘psycho-logic’. For example, we told ourselves that we buried the dead outside of town to avoid the dead coming back to haunt us — creating a hygienically beneficial social norm that saved lives long before we discovered the science of germs. Meanwhile, people voted for Brexit not because they wanted to be poorer but because they put a greater priority on national identity and sovereignty.
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