The blog

At the start of their book ‘Nudge’, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein make a distinction between ‘Econs’ and ‘Humans’. Econs, they say, make decisions rationally, never letting their emotions get in the way. However complicated a decision, they’ll always think it through logically and end up making the perfect call (unlike Humans). That distinction’s based […]

If you’ve ever Googled around for naming advice, you’ll have seen all the usual tips like ‘don’t choose a name that’s hard to pronounce’ and ‘make sure the domain name’s available’. Those are fine, and you should absolutely follow them, but they won’t really help you decide your company name. The fact is there’s only […]

Do you remember going out on Christmas morning into the freshly fallen snow? Wearing matching hat, scarf, and gloves? Making snowmen and angels, having snowball fights, and sledding? Seems familiar right? Actually, white Christmases are very rare. So rare (and so heavily bet upon) that the Met Office had to change its definition of a […]

We sat down with Joe to talk about all things behavioural science.   What’s behavioural science to you? It’s the science of who we are and what we do. It starts with accepting we’re not logical masterminds, and that we’re more influenced by the world around us than we think. If we see a door […]

Spoiler alert: If you’ve not been to Flat Iron, or Le Relais de Venise, but are going to, and don’t want me to spoil the surprise, stop reading now. There’s loads of research about how we seem inordinately impressed when we get stuff for free. And I’ve been impressed how two London steak restaurants have built […]

Ah, the herding effect. The idea that we, the human race, are far less free-thinking than we’d like to believe. And that if we see a crowd, we instinctively want to follow it. In recent years behavioural scientists have been quick to tell us what ‘most people like us’ are doing: whether that’s paying a […]

After England lost to Belgium last week, a media debate raged about whether Gareth Southgate, England’s manager, had made the right decision in fielding a weakened team. As I listened to a radio show, caller after caller rang in to make their case. One side argued that losing the game was a disaster because it […]

We’ve just had results back from a trial with a company that helps people get back into work. The sales team cold calls people who’ve been made redundant to offer a get-back-into-work package. We split the team into two groups: Team Brown (after Derren) and Team Beige. We gave Team Brown some behavioural tricks to […]