The thing about Behavioural Economics…

Pic c/o Chinamusicforum.com

Weekend before last I found myself engaged in a silly twitter debate about the problems with BE – “Nudging” – with someone I didn’t know and who was determined not to listen.

I know, stupid old me for bothering and doing so on a weekend. And late at night, too.

But it wasn’t just a pointless piece of trolling or acting out my frustrations: I’ve long felt that the (relatively recent) rush to embrace BE by many research and marketing practitioners is somewhat short-sighted (I’ve previously discussed this here in terms of “BE not going far enough”)

It’s not – clearly – that I don’t think that BE is a great step forward for thinking about human – and consumer – behaviour. BE genuinely is.

It gives a much better map of how many decisions are made – how we are more Kirk-like than Spock-like (intuitive, emotional and approximate); that our minds are essentially lazy, using short-hands and approximate impressionistic inferences rather “doing the math”.

It’s spawned a host of really interesting innovation – for example, Brainjuicer’s focus on “system 1” advertising effects, which seem to explain the very top performing examples in that field.

And it’s scientifically robust, being based on a good experimental base (so claimed findings can be checked by repeating experiments).

Far better indeed than the various rational agent models that we’ve inherited (largely from classical economics theory).

But….(yes, there is a series of buts coming along shortly)…

BE is only a partial account of human behaviour (albeit an appealing one to many thinkers and practitioners for different reasons).

It’s not the whole deal by any means.

And the map of human choices it offers is missing some centrally important things.

If you like, it remains one-eyed.

So over the next few days – and in anticipation of my keynote at IIEX Behavioural Marketing Forum in NYC on Nov 9th – I’m going to explore where I think BE falls short.

In theory and in practice.

Along the way, we’ll look at things like scalability (why is it that BE insights often don’t seem to work at the level of large groups or populations?), at the importance of culture in shaping behaviour (which BE ignores), at the cultural bias it and its advocates are themselves subject to.

And, of course, to BE’s downplaying of copying, social learning, emulation, social influence, etc. All the social stuff that animates my – our – work.