The Lost Genius of Irrationality: Rory Sutherland at TEDxOxford

there's an Oxford resident called name of Dawkins who's written an influential and worthwhile I think book called uh The God Delusion and I have no particular beef with it except I think

with the southern English edition because whereas there are parts of the world patently where the meme of religion and the divisions that it generally inculcates in society uh can

lead to extraordinary dangerous and divisive effects I don't really see the problem in Britain to the same extent I mean when I traveled up from Kent this morning I didn't really pause for a second or more to consider the

possibility that my plane my my my train might be hijacked by Suicidal methodists um uh when I walked from the station uh to uh the theater here I didn't actually

you know circumspectly glance around me all the time in Terror that I might be pistol whipped by Quakers but it struck me it's highly unlikely even if Britain and parts of Continental Europe are actually less

adversely ected by some of the worst excesses of religious belief that there are other delusions which we ought to be investigating far more and my great chrism of of Dawkins English edition of the book is that it really should have

been retitled the football delusion now I'm probably I'm from that part of the country where there is no football I'm from the Welsh borders and we just don't have the soccer Gene to

the same extent but it does strike me as interesting not so much football because I have no beef with people watching football enjoying football football attending football matches at all doesn't seem to be a problem if you choose to derive a large amount of

pleasure from watching a series of completely random events play out uh effectively pinball on grass and then choose to construct around those events a narrative entirely of your own

devising well it's not for me to say you're wrong um it's not for me really to point out that the statistics of football make it actually in terms of individual matches not league play the

Imp purest of all sports uh actually the second baseball is actually uh even worse but if you'll notice they never play individual knockout matches in baseball they will always play the World

Series is decided on the best of seven no but I have no problem with this at all it's obviously patently an enjoyable sport from which people derive a huge amount of pleasure what I do have a problem with is football

commentary because it seems to be a case where every single thing that happens in soccer is attributed to intentional human agency and not to luck so if a

team loses a match there are immediately calls not act you know for the resignation of the manager despite the fact that statistically the single result is more or less irrelevant notice too that it's not like a game like

tennis where the play takes place in lots of individual compartmentalized sections and where actually you can say that each uh each point played in tennis

is more or less independent of the proceeding one although there's an interesting separate debate about tennis which a friend of mine Richard Thomasson observed which is to say that the interesting thing about tennis is that

the entire drama and exciting Narrative of tennis is created by the scoring system if you played tennis but you scored it like basketball it would be

unwatchable if you imagine you know you effectively federa leads Murray by 247 points to 163 you're not going to stick around the fact that you have compartmentalized sets you have

retaining serve and losing serve gives it a kind of interesting narrative Arc which makes it watchable as a sport a very intelligent critic of basketball made the point he said I don't understand why it takes so long why

don't they just start at 100 points each and then play the last four minutes is but now the odd thing about soccer is that everything even though most of the events are random the score line is so

small as to be more or less statistically insignificant probably only a small percentage of P play actually contributes to a goal and where it's actually philosophically true to say that the entire score line would be

fundamentally different if the coin toss at the beginning before play even started went the other way and yet people will construct extraordinary amounts of synthetic happiness or indeed

synthetic misery around the result they will construct an entire story of how the match went which is designed to create a kind of narrative and then the commentators

effectively make every single result however statistically minor I don't include League results in this aggregated results seem to have meaning as though it's necessary to construct about 500 a thousand words of

description everything is the product of human agency every goal was either brilliantly struck in the case that it actually created a goal or of course a complete [ __ ] up in the case that it

missed the only non-human agency is when you get the most peculiar sentence of the lot which is um and the crossbar foiled drogas efforts so when you do

actually attribute agency to something that's non-human it's to a piece of wood um this is strange and it did lead me to think watching football commentary which does seem increasingly nonsensical in

many ways simply because it attributes a kind of Simplicity and a narrative to events which are actually highly complex and have a huge degree of Randomness within them and it did cause me to ask

the question which I suppose is Contra Dawkins which is that would an ancient Greek football commentator actually be more honest than a contemporary one there a great point I think of chesteron

that when we cease to believe in God we don't believe in nothing we believe in anything and the extent to which we tend to attribute to events which are the um process of complex phenomena many of

which are completely unpredictable and certainly can't be designed in advance the fact that we do that seems to be an inaccuracy an ancient Greek commentator

would not attempt to make human agency the single driver of the score line in a soccer match he would use useful phrases which acknowledge the unknowable the

uncertain and the role of Fate he might say everything was going well for United and then feus Apollo decided to thwart their Midfield efforts now there is an argument that that is actually a more accurate picture

of the world than one in which you see human intentionality and agency in every single outcome now why this seems to be important is for a very interesting

reason which is I went to see a talk by Richard sailor the author of nudge about six months ago and he said something which I thought was perhaps among the most important sentences I've heard in

two or three years and he said that the interesting thing about economists is that they are generally opposed to monopolies they view monopolies as a very bad thing altogether and yet the strange thing

about Economist is they're entirely comfortable about the Monopoly they themselves enjoy and economics has gained and sailor made this point brilliantly as a behavioral Economist

that economics has a almost a monopoly an unconscious Monopoly in many cases over business decision- making and over government policymaking and it's achieved this

through slightly surreptitious means which is economics posits a ludicrously oversimplified individualistic model of human decision- making treating

everybody as a rational actor busily maximizing their own utility without reference to powerful human emotions such as uh mistrust or regret it assumes

that everybody making a decision has access to perfect information which of course freezes marketing out of the picture altogether and effectively makes it irrelevant but it also assumes that

people decide individually and that they're unaffected either by habit or habituation or contagion in other words the very powerful human defaults of do what I did last time and do what

everybody else does but because it makes these dangerous assumptions it's able to construct elegant mathematical models around what should happen it's not scientific in the sense of being an empirical science it's merely scientific

in that you can construct mathematical models and equations which make you appear scientific and hyek called this science ISM that you actually you you you steal

if you like the clothes and the language of Newtonian physics and you apply it to something where such certainty such sort of linear associations have actually no place human behavior is far far closer

to meteorology than it is to bridge building or train building or track laying in the kind of science you need and yet strangely economists have rather enjoyed this completely unwarranted

control they have so nearly all businesses for example and all governments will have a Chief Economist or a chief economic officer but no business I know of has a chief Anthropologist no business I know of has

a chief game theorist I don't know many businesses Southwest Airlines as one exception which actually have a behavioral economics team but there are multiple Sciences which are needed to

understand the workings of mass groups of people and economics on its own with its Assumption of individual action unaffected by the actions of others this is this is to make the assumption that

actually you don't really have fashion in clothing everybody gets up every morning and decides personally without reference to anybody else what is fashionable and it's extraordinary

dangerous a very interesting man called um well you'll know Max plank who is effectively the founder of quantum physics he had a friend who was an economist who said max why don't you become an economist it's good money you

get to go to conferences advise governments that kind of thing um you know probably be a bit more fun than doing the math gig and plank who is probably the most brilliant mathematician of the C he replied I

couldn't do economics he said the maths is too difficult because what he understood is that once you acknowledge the fact that people are actually there are feedback mechanisms at work that people are influenced by the behavior of

other people around them those simple mathematical models that make economics convincing and give it its influence actually start to fall down so looking for delusions or Strange Behaviors other

than soccer which I think is a huge product of narrative bias and tribalism uh elsewhere in society other than the relig seems to me a fruitful area for

activity and the big problem seems to be in many many cases we assume individual agency we assume that everything we do is a product of individual choice and that we do it because we like it the

extent to which we Outsource our decision-making processes to other people and actually default to Norms or default to past habit tend to be downplayed because this economic model

still predominates in the understanding of how a business is how capitalism is a efficient why competition is good and so on and so forth so here are a couple more uh

wine I have always thought that wine like football is slightly strange in that it doesn't deserve its runaway popularity especially as a drink without food in which conditions French people

and Italians very rarely drink it it's an atrocious drink in many respects it's atrocious in that It Breaks the Rules of all successful consumer products where first of all some sort of consistency of

quality is usually considered a good thing um you would find it very difficult operating a pub where one pint in every three of beer tasted like

piss and yet pubs can sell wine under those conditions where when you buy a glass of wine in a pub the odds that it's actually not disgusting are I'd place it slightly better than 5050 and

yet people happily pay £450 for it okay most people I think it's fair to say most of the time would prefer a gin and tonic to a white wine but they ask for a white wine what's going on here I think

there are a lot of complicated things all working in um effectively together one of which is there are effective social biases it is very appealing for

places like this I'm sure there'll be a drinks party afterwards in which will be uttered to you what Kingsley Aus described as the three worst words in the English language which are red or

white um one of the reasons is that it's extraordinar profitable to sell wine um or or indeed to give it way because there's no known price anchor you can't charge 25 quid for a Gordon and tonic

because we know what Gordon costs and we know what scheps cost when you have an obscure wine of no known Providence you can actually achieve egregious markups simply because people go well it sounds

kind of Posh and this is an expensive restaurant so I suppose it's vaguely plausible that I'm getting my money's worth it's extraordinarily inconsistent Michael McIntyre the comedian makes the point that it's the only thing served in

a restaurant where they ask you to smell it before you drink it to check it not wrong now don't bother be wrong but isn't that their job you don't get a wait to bring you the milk to go with your coffee at the end of the meal and

going I think this might be slightly off I was wondering if you could just check um there may be a degree and I've got friends who know a great deal about wine who work in the restaurant business who are actually convinced that most people pretend to like it that even if

you serve a bottle of wine that's fundamentally corked people will nearly always drink it the only clue is that they usually don't order a second bottle but they very rarely send it back

because no one is actually confident enough to say there is something wrong with this wine so simple fear of social embarrassment and the pretense that you enjoy something plays A Part Choice architecture we've seen a bit about

Choice earlier wine by an extraordinary accident comes in two colors which means that if you just buy six bottles of white wine and six bottles of red wine you've deemed to have offered your you're deemed to have offered your

guests a choice you can't offer your guests one alcoholic drink because that's kind of rude you've got to actually offer them the courtesy I think the previous talk was woman always talking about this the illusion that they are in

control the is if you wanted to serve spirits that would require you to buy five different bottles of spirits four or five different mixers and three different kinds of fruit it's

Troublesome bizarrely if you just say red or white tea or coffee still or sparkling those two things basically tick the box marked have offered a choice what you've actually done is you've given them two drinks they don't

like very much but they get to choose the color nonetheless for the purposes of social uh events that is deemed to be sufficient there are tons of other biases as well because there are an

insane number of types of wine when you go to the supermarket it dominates the shelves and we have a very big heuristic in our shopping in a supermarket which whatever there's a lot of in the shelves

is probably pretty good so wine will occupy something like 10 ft of shelf space uh to every one foot occupied by Spirits it's also if you notice very easy to buy because you get to the end

of the supermarket and you go ooh look there's wine I'll have red and white and I'll remember to put the in the fridge and you usually don't okay if you want to buy Spirits suddenly you realize at that point the path dependency is

working against you you have to double back go and find some mixers and then in the case of pims of course you have to return all the way to the beginning of the store to buy seven different types

of fruit um against the direction of traffic in the store so you default to Wine an experiment interestingly in path dependency was done by a group of retailers and Spirits manufacturers who created a cocktail pod right at the end

of the supermarket and it was it had a freezer b a freezer full of ice it had a whole rack of mixers and it had two baskets of lemons and limes and it just said cocktail pod but it was at the

point in the supermarket where it was effectively alongside your what shall I drink tonight what shall I offer our guests Point rather than requiring you to double back when they introduced that

sales of spirits in those stores overall went up by about 8% it's extraordinary effect simply the product of path dependency now when all these when this concatenation of various stuff all comes together there's also

the thing that we actually like alcohol and wine is the acceptable middle class dressing in which to consume it stand around with a glass of wine at lunchtime and you're seen as a bit of a bon ver

but basically a respectable Bourgeois chat tequila shots in the office at lunchtime on the other hand do not convey anything of the same thing so at some level we have no choice because of

course we buy wine not for the effect it has on us but the impression it has on other people and that is actually a social construct over which we have very little control but the important thing about this is the overstatement of individual

human agency and the power of self-control when faced with external network forces it's very very widely known in the software industry that to some extent market share is a huge

product benefit that you know there is a great Advantage once you create the iOS ecosystem and you have more apps than everybody else that's one ecosystem and you also have more accessories cases

charges and strange Bluetooth sort of accessories than any other operating system then you enjoy a disproportionate advantage over everybody else it's known widely in uh uh Network externalities and known widely in the software

industry I would just contend that they're actually much more prevalent than we think but the fact that they work on us unconsciously causes us often to discount them it also causes us I

think to expect too much of individual effort in terms of Behavioral change and I'll come to that in a second I'll give you one third example of network externalities it is widely believed and universally sted by Brits that the the

English and English language speaking countries in general make very bad linguists we just don't make the effort to speak and learn foreign languages and that's generally

attributed to our own failings or our own overconfidence smugness uh lack of interest if you look at that from a point of view not of individual agency but from the point of view of network

effects you know read by the way Paul um very very good book by Paul omod called positive linking which has just come out what you suddenly realize it's bit more complicated than that first of all if

you imagine a Dutchman considering whether he should learn English versus an Englishman deciding whether to learn Dutch the gains to the Dutchman in

learning English are possibly a 100 times greater than vice versa in terms of English will be useful to him wherever he goes even speaking to people for whom English is also not their first

language it will be of useful to him in France it will even be of more use to him in former Dutch colonies like South Africa for example or Indonesia he also has a head start he's consumed

something like one or two probably 10,000 hours of English language TV wisely with subtitles not with the idiot dubbing habit um over the course of his life so English idiom and tonality and

so forth everything in fact other than the pronunciation of the letter s will come fairly naturally to him a friend of mine had to fly over from stanstead to Amsterdam regularly on a plane called

the city Hopper which unfortunately had Dutch Pilots which led to very amusing announcements I I have to add but um now let's look let's look a little further

to the English person wondering whether to learn a foreign language which one the choice architecture is a complete mess you can now just about make a case for Mandarin Chinese maybe Spanish uh Portuguese

conceivably but it isn't a clearcut absolutely obvious thing it's extremely unlikely that there will be any social effects if the Dutchman says to a few of his friends I'm thinking of improving my Engish he

will find four or five other friends who say I agree with you let's go along and do something about it if I suddenly conceive the urge as an English speaker to speak Turkish I'm pretty sure my friends will

get basically give me the reaction you're on your [ __ ] own mate okay now let's take it a bit further still and look at further Network effects which is let's say I put a huge

amount of effort into learning Dutch my Dutch only becomes useful to me in real terms not in gradations bit by bit word by word verb by verb adjective

by adjective it only really Becomes of any use whatsoever when my Dutch is better than the average Dutchman's English and that's really really

difficult unless you live there even if you do they will try and reply to you in English in any case so the point that whereas a Dutchman actually gains from learning English incrementally an

Englishman only gains from learning Dutch once he reaches some vital Tipping Point of extraordinary fluency makes the whole thing completely unequal so it's

not entirely our fault uh you can add an extra dimension of confusion which is in one respect and someone wrote to me about this the English are actually very good linguists which is we're very good

at understanding English when spoken by non-native English speakers so we have actually honed our linguistic skills quite rarely to understand English when it's spoken or accentuated or intonated in a very

unusual way if you actually get the gender wrong in French they don't understand what an earth talking about if you ask for La lemonad they haven't got a clue and then

about 6 minutes later they go ah L lionard now is suddenly uh you know Clarity Clarity has now descended upon me now it's possible it's possible this

is just frankly willful perversity on the part of French speakers but but since there have been no recorded cases of willful perversity in France in the last 200 years I think this explanation

can be discounted um so I think it's more likely to assume that in fact we get a lot of practice that we don't even realize of understanding people speaking English in a weird way it's very

interesting in the United States where people aren't exposed to unusual English accents asking for a cup of water is almost impossible because I can't pronounce water in a way that an American can understand it so actually

some of these utterly bizarre um differences the fact that even worse was a friend of mine who learned Hungarian by the way which is the problem is that no Hungarian has ever come across a

foreigner who's learned Hungarian before so he assumed that they would go H I see that you're an Englishman who has learned Hungarian I am so gra gratified and flattered that you have bothered to

learn my virtually intractable language no they assumed he was a Hungarian but just very very stupid so so what I'm saying here here is that we make a mistake by not looking

at the world nearly enough from a network perspective in many cases I think that uh technological problems are often marketing problem s and perception problemss in Disguise the electronic

cigarette one fairly good scientist believes if adopted by most American smokers would reduce the uh smoking related deaths by two orders of magnitude the problem actually is one of

networks that it's a weird thing to use people don't feel comfortable using it so all those rock stars and aging cool rock stars who've been briefly implicated in the Jimmy saavil Scandal one way you can redeem yourselves is by

smoking electronic cigarettes heavily in public lending them an atmosphere of cool and general acceptability but here you have a technology which individually it should be an easy choice or at least

an easy thing to experiment with the problem is actually the extent to which most of our behavior is actually mediated by the behavior of and affected by the behavior of other people electric

cars are no longer a technological problem it's how you get people to accept them but in one thing I think this is really important and I i' I've talked to some very interesting people who know much more about this than I do

so credit to them which is that when we design behavioral change programs or when we tell people what the ideal behavior is we design it in a way which

is perfectly rational from an individual standpoint but from a collective or social standpoint is virtually impossible to adere to now let me give you an example if you want people to cut

down on their drinking because people are worried about excessive drinking the general assumption is you look at lots of epidemiological studies and you come to a conclusion that people who drink up

to let's say 28 units 21 units of alcohol a week don't seem to come to any long-term harm so you make that the recommendation you make it a numerical recommendation simly calorie restricted

diets tell you you should eat this much every day now there's a couple of problems there one of which is that it is much

harder to stick to a quantitative restriction than a binary one if you notice most of us when we drive break the speed limit every time we drive not

by by much but by a bit it simply doesn't feel that bad or wrong going 34 and a 30 limit very very few of us even at 3 in the morning when there isn't a person at sight in sight and actually

the person who pressed the button on The Pedestrian Crossing has long since walked away very few of us will run a red light it some simply feels wrong in a way that is isn't true of what you

might call eating a few calories too many secondly in terms of behavior if you think about that limit of 28 let's say units of alcohol a week there's a fundamental problem there which is that

it often requires you to stop drinking when you're already drunk oh [ __ ] having a great evening oh bug I've just reached my 28 right I'm

must stop right now okay now let's just see kind it's not going to happen is it right but thirdly in order to make a restriction on how much you drunk socially contagious to actually make it

socially self-reinforcing all your friends even though you may live in different parts of of Britain and only meet up once or twice all of you have to drink at exactly the same

rate because otherwise you go oh no How likely is this to happen Okay well I'm I'm actually you know I've got 15 units to go actually I'm planning on a really large one this evening but I see you've

just reached your 28 so I'll stop and keep your company okay it's not going to happen again okay so this is where what appears to be rational behavioral design

comes into conflict both with our own individual ability to stick to things and we're better at sticking to things if you notice all religious law is binary there's no such thing as 50%

kosher food it either is or it isn't and that's partly because you could do this you can't do that is relies on habituation I've been on a sort of no carb diet whether it's good for you as a

diet or not is completely debatable it's worked extraordinary well and I'll explain why in a minute what's undoubtedly true is that it works partly because it becomes self-reinforcing after a while you look at Danish

pastries with mild disgust simply because you haven't eaten them in the last two months and they look kind of weird and different but there's another magic to designing things to be binary

which is their socially self-reinforcing and the trick really of my diet which it doesn't look very successful from where you're standing but trust me you should have seen me a few months ago okay the real success of it is I got my wife to

go on the thing at the same time and the basic point is you don't eat carbohydrates you don't eat grains you don't eat sugar you um in that sense so it's it's effectively a binary diet you

can eat any quantity you like of X but you can't eat y now one of the things is it's cognitively much much easier because you've only got to self exercise self-control once a week which is when you shop because if you don't buy any

carbs there aren't any in the house so you don't eat them a calorie restriction diet where you count the calories every day requires you to exercise self-control every single time you eat a

meal now that's almost impossible I me that's actually like giving up sex by going to lap dancing clubs instead you know it's effectively saying in order to actually have less of

something we should give you just enough of something to get you really interested and then tell you to stop too soon okay that is not an easy thing that makes insane demands of our self-control so the interesting point

I'm making here and this applies to alcohol is maybe if you say don't drink alcohol three days a week and you get all your friends not to drink on Monday Wednesday and Thursday or Monday Tuesday

Wednesday or in January that has two virtues it's absolutely binary it doesn't require you to exercise any self-control when you're drunk because you don't get drunk secondly your friends can engage in the same thing at

the same time so you never under any any social pressure and then you realize that actually behind most religious law there may be very little apparent rationality of the Dawkins kind but

there's an extraordinary amount of psychological insight because it understands that in for laws to stick they need social reinforcement they need to work in terms

of you know each person's Behavior being visible to each other they need to make transgression actually apparent and they need to be binary now this may make them less rational the

person who says 28 units a week has tons of signs to back up his recommendation 3 days a week don't drink there's actually no signs for that it's theoretically it's Bonkers because you could be a

raging alcoholic on four days a week and not drink on the other three on the other hand if you look at religion it has actually survived for a few thousand years which suggests that it has some

sort of stickability and religious law is what BJ fog calls crunchy it's binary it's you can do this you can't do that and the interesting thing if you look at it is the French got very

worried that people were working too hard which was causing unemployment so they created a very French rationalistic thing which is called I think the working time directive which limits your working time to 35 hours a week how do

you spot someone who's cheating you know he just I got up late you know how how do you actually spot trans 3,000 years ago someone had come up with a better answer it was called the Sabbath and everybody does it at the

same time now it's not as perfect mathematically as the French solution but in psychological terms in terms of crunchiness and in terms of social self-reinforcement it is much much cleverer

legislation so the understanding that what we may be suffering in part I genuinely contend this is government's ability to engage in arbitrary Universal

legislation in defiance of rational CR you know criticism that sometimes actually arbitrary law like the Sabbath is vastly more effective at behavioral change than doing everything by some sort of

mathematical question of degree but unfortunately the requirement that everything appears to be rational beforehand and the assumption that individual agency is everything and we

have unlimited sources of self-control causes us actually arguably perhaps now this is a really contentious point which I don't don't expect you to take seriously and please don't but actually

to some ENT the absence of religion and the absence of monarchy have made it more difficult to legislate in some quite intelligent ways simply because

the requirement is that it's clear it's Universal but it's seemingly slightly arbitrary and it's very difficult for a modern democracy to do this just one final thing which I always felt

instinctively and only realized why this morning the power of of of of effective of what you might call flock behavior is this I'd always had a vague feeling that speed cameras which we can debate about

any ly and most motorists do there was something slightly wrong with a speed camera on a dual carriageway and I couldn't work out why it was a speed camera on a single you know two car two two lane road where cars going in

opposite directions seem to me kind of to make sense you're coming into a village it says 35 limit if you go 38 the camera flashes and you're fine okay but when we drive on a dual

carriageway we actually drive socially we almost become like flocks of birds and one of the rules is which is more or less in the UK it applies to different countries is the person in the right

hand lane should at all times go a bit faster than the person in the lane to the left of them so what the speed camera does is it tries to encourage everybody to drive at the same speed in both lanes which is deeply inimicable to

us instinctively because everything about her says the right lane must go a bit faster and there are good reasons for this if you don't have a difference in speed between the two lanes it's impossible for people to change lanes

when they need to um so there's a very very good reason for this Instinct but the problem you get with a speed camera is your instinct to actually slow down to the specified limit and your instinct to go slower faster than the person to

the left or slower than the person of the right come into conflict and here you have a rule which actually seems to work from the Assumption of individual human agency once you understand the extent to which our actions are actually

determined by the actions of others it completely falls down I don't know how to use this insight to solve problems but I suspect there are many many interesting heuristics you can design and the design

of better heuristics even if they're not imposed by compulsion they're simply Advanced by governments as good practices seems to be an extraordinary

area for improving social behavior simply giving people mentally easy socially contagious heuristics I'll I'll end with a very good one it's called the Minnesota zipper merge and I don't know

how many of you drive because you're all mostly students you go around on bicycles and therefore become very environmentally conscious because you ride bicycles even though you think it's the other way around but I'll I'll I'll

park that one um uh but anyway um the extent to which actually our attitudes are a product of our actions rather than the other way around deserves a bit more investigation but the Minnesota ziper merge was uh I I don't know whether it

actually came in when Jesse Ventura the professional wrestler was governor of that state but it's a beautiful thing when you come to a point where there's a contra flow on a Motorway or two lanes go down to

one there are huge conflicts going on in people am I a late merger in which case other people in the left hand lane the lane that doesn't close will accuse me of Q

jumping do I try and merge too early because I'm terrified of being accused of Q jumping because you have to remember in Britain that Q jumping is on a par with pedophilia on the list of things people don't want to be

associated with all that happens is completely dissonant behavior from everybody those late mergers who are then resented by the people who've been in the right lane and then who who try not to let them in versus the people who

merge too early wasting available Road and causing the tail back to stretch back too far effectively are caused by a heuristic conflict what they did in Minnesota was beautiful they just invented a word for

it the zipper merge and suddenly when you've got a word for it it can become a social norm and the way it works is beautifully simple you're told zip a merge ahead stay in Lane go to the end of the lane

when you get to the merger point you take it in turns one lane at a time end of story that's what Daniel K call a system one mental process now it would be more efficient logically if you had

10 cars from one lane 10 cars from the other lane at that point people start to cheat and pretend they miscounted and go through as the 11th car it no longer works what this does apparently is it reduces the accident rate and it vastly

speeds the flow of traffic through intersections and all it is is not through government in compulsive terms telling you how to behave it's simply government creating a word for something

which then creates the behavior which is socially beneficial now that's not my best example there's an even better example I discovered a week ago the entire phrase designated driver was

invented in marketing that when you have a name for it you have a sudden way to explain why you're sitting in the pub drinking a Coke and the Very existence of the phrase designated driver enable people to say before we go out this

evening who's the DD in Amsterdam in Holland they did a separate thing they did a marketing campaign where the designated driver is always known as Bob uh and they asked a slightly surreal question who is going

to be Bob this evening now that is a case where you create effectively a heuristic which is every time we go out on the Raz one person stays sober very useful jistic you can take it in turns

it's easy to do once you've named the behavior the behavior becomes both easier to stick to and more contagious the interesting question then is what to what extent should

governments seek to cease to actually endlessly attempt to actually interfere with us through compulsion and the standard neoclassical economic Assumption of of of effectively

incentives and disincentives and punishments to what extent can you improve Society by the creation and naming of better heuristics that's an open brief which I leave to all of you

and I'm very pleased to be going last but I would love to know your suggestions thank you very much indeed