More from the Introduction - and why I was wondering if I'd ever get out of it - Sutherland has a subsection of a subsection where he warns "Be careful before calling something nonsense." Ordinarily, ,that might be good advice, but he explains with an example of a "1996 survey on the place of religion in public life in America [he's British]" by the Heritage Institute that found 1. Churchgoers are more likely to be married, less likely to be divorced or single and more likely to manifest high levels of satisfaction in their marriage.

People are not cargo. We choose how and when to travel, influenced not only by speed and time but by habit, status, comfort, variety– and many other factors that engineering equations don’t capture at all. This leads me to another problem: This book is plagued by selection bias. There are many times where rational ideas are in fact the best ones. There are plenty of times where logical thinking trumps emotional thinking. And there are also times where I questioned his evaluation of what constitutes an overreliance on logic and what constitutes, ahem, Alchemy. Unfortunately there is a lot of chaff, and most of it is shed by the massive Worzel Gummidge army of strawmen the author assembles to support his arguments. Another way to attribute value is to massage the semantics of a product, situation, activity. His example, "downsizing" as a voluntary move from a no longer needed larger home into a smaller one can be perceived (or communicated) as a decision of preference rather than a settlement of financial need. Sutherland says, Create a name, and you've created a norm. A person doing recruitment may think they want to hire the best person for the job, but subconsciously they want to avoid hiring someone who is bad. Low variance will be as appealing as high average performance. Hiring a group of people makes for less conventional candidates.In repairing damage caused by alcoholism, drug addiction and marital breakdown, religious belief and practice are a major source of recovery. Why is Red Bull so popular, though everyone— everyone!—hates the taste? Humans are, in a word, irrational, basing decisions as much on subtle external signals (that little blue can) as on objective qualities (flavor, price, quality). The surrounding world, meanwhile, is irreducibly complex and random. This means future success can’t be projected on any accounting spreadsheet. To strike gold, you must master the dark art and curious science of conjuring irresistible ideas: alchemy. The best thinkers are those able to cross disciplines, deploying theories from one area into others. One man who does this exceptionally well is Rory Sutherland. As Vice Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK he is an ad-man. But he is also a student of behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology and complexity economics, which he prospects for ideas to help him understand consumer behaviour.

Despite approaching Microsoft with the idea of a system whereby people could share Office documents over the nascent internet and being roundly rejected, Rory went on to help found OgilvyOne, the group’s dedicated digital and direct agency. He remains an advocate of so-called ‘360 Degree Branding’ ensuring brands have a coherent, joined-up presence in all relevant media areas. Rory was appointed Head of Copy, and shortly afterwards Creative Director of Ogilvy. He has also served as the president of the Institute of Practioners in Advertising (IPA) - the first ‘creative’ to do so. Ogilvy is now part of the massive WPP ad and media group and count Ford, Unilever, IBM, American Express, BP, and British Airways amongst their top accounts. Good quote from Cedric Villani, mathematician and winner of a Fields Medal: "There are key two steps a mathematician uses. He uses intuition to guess the right problem and the right solution and then logic to prove it." Like classic behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, Sutherland peels away hidden, often irrational human behaviors that explain how the world around us functions. In How to Be an Alchemist he examines why certain ads work and the broader truths they tell us about who we are. Why do people prefer stripy toothpaste, and how might that help us design retirement plans that young people would actually buy? Why do we think orange juice is healthy, and how does the same principle guide our feelings about nuclear reactors? Why do budget airlines advertise services they don’t offer—and what might insurance companies learn from them about keeping healthcare costs low? Soap was sold on its ability to increase your attractiveness more than on its hygienic powers, and while it contained many chemicals to improve hygiene, it was also scented to make it attractive - supporting the unconscious promise of the advertising rather than the rational value of the product. The scent was not to make it effective, but to make it attractive to consumers.

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Here's a good quote: "Behaviour comes first; attitude changes to keep up." That flies in the face of convention that attitudes drive behavior. Give people recycling bins and require them to separate...they probably become more environmentally aware. He says "Give people a reason and they may not supply the behaviour; but give people a behaviour and they'll have no problem supplying the reason themselves. Look, I'm not saying the big idea here is bankrupt. It's true that sometimes we get caught up in overly logical thinking and forget that humans are very silly, dumb, and emotional animals and often do what they do for silly, dumb, and emotional reasons. This is important to keep in mind especially, I would say, in marketing. But that single big idea is really all this book has to offer. By removing the record function from the Walkman, Sony clarified what the device was for. Technical design term for this is "affordance". My word to describe the way we make decisions — to distinguish it from the artificial concepts of ‘logic’ and ‘rationality… I have chosen psycho-logic as a neutral and non-judgemental term. I have done this for a reason. When we do put a name to non-rational behaviour, it is usually a word like ‘emotion’, which makes it sound like logic’s evil twin.”- Rory Sutherland 1. Competence before confidence

Transport is desperately in need of good ideas and innovation. This highly original and entertaining book is filled with both. " For example, the author explains that US companies give terrible holiday to workers because it's considered to dent productivity. He says: "There is an abundance of supporting evidence" for the fact that giving workers generous holiday doesn't hinder and probably helps productivity, but nevertheless "in the left-brain logical model of the world, productivity is proportional to hours worked, and a doubling of holiday time must lead to a corresponding 4% fall in salary." AND WHILE I AM HERE: there's a chapter on the placebo effect which says perfectly sensible things about exploiting the effect for everyone's benefit (eg why not colour aspirin red, because it feels more dramatic to take red pills) and then suggests that for the same reason we should encourage the use of homeopathy. That just sums this book up--Mr. Too Clever For Logic apparently can't see any difference between better marketing of an effective product and selling something as medicine when we know for a fact it doesn't work. There is a point where marketing becomes active dishonesty and this careers over it.

People do not choose brand A over brand B because they think brand A is better, but because they are more certain it is good. (minimising variance) The greatest hope for a brighter future lies in adapting transport to more human wants and needs. Behavioural science has immense potential to improve the design of vehicles, roads, railways, planes and pavements– as well as the ways in which we use them – but only when we embrace the messier reality of how people travel. To me personally three themes particularly stood out. First, the Girardian nature of the book - Sutherland's thoughts on when to avoid what amounts to mimetic rivalry and when to harness it constitute a rare practical application of Girardian theory. Second, there is a fair amount of overlap between Taleb and Sutherland, but in comparison to the former, Sutherland's explanations and illustrations of concepts like scientism, ergodicity and bounded rationality are noticeably clearer, and certainly less petulant. One might think many animals will adopt and change their color to surrounding so as to hide from predator. However, there are few insects/worms which have adopted to be very brightly and lively colored which makes them easily visible even from far distances. This should make them easy prey in the wild?? … maybe not. It’s a costly signalling but it works,