Rory Sutherland: evaluation

Transcript context

…You've used this term psychological psychology, psycho-ology a few times- Psychologic and psychological. In other words, there's a different mechanism for logic and decision-making within the evolved human brain, which is actually quite a lot more nuanced and more sophisticated than the mechanisms for decision-making that economists theorize because it has to account for imperfect information, it has to account for variance in outcome. It has to account for asymmetrical information, and it has to account for imperfect trust. So we've evolved to effectively operate in decision-making under uncertainty as Herbert Simon called it. And yet most of the actual design of procedures that we encounter are designed for effectively information decision-making under certainty. And that's a very special case, which actually never applies completely, I would argue, or certainly very rarely actually occurs in the real world. It mainly actually is found in economic models. You have a really good insight into why we think in this irrational, illogical way, which I love. You talk about how if we were evolving in the savanna, if an animal's very predictable and very logical, they're a lot easier to catch. Can you just talk a bit about that because I think-…

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