This document discusses how digital media and behavioral data can provide insights into human behavior. It notes that while all models are imperfect, some can still be useful. The document highlights the interplay between technology, psychology, and economics in understanding behavior. It references concepts like heuristics, biases, and David Rock's SCARF model of human motivations to understand how people make decisions with limited information and time. The document concludes by listing several relevant books on these topics.

1. The third eye….
(or what happens when n=millions)
How digital media and behavioural data might finally provide
us with a robust way of understanding human behaviour.
@rorysutherland

5. All models are wrong,
but some of them are
useful.

6. All models are
wrong, but some of
them are dangerous.

10. The sweet spot
Technology
Psychology
Economics

11. How it should work.

12. How economists* pretend it works
* Business executives and civil servants are more guilty than economists in this respect

15. “Thus, the conventional
view that natural selection
favors nervous systems
which produce ever more
accurate images of the
world must be a very naive
view of mental evolution”
(Trivers 1976/2006)

22. Heuristics
"I
sn’t more information always better? In economics, Nobel
prizes are regularly awarded for work that assumes that people
make decisions as if they had perfect information and could
compute the optimal solution for the problem at hand. But how do
real people make good decisions under the usual conditions of
little time and scarce information? Consider how players catch a
ball—in baseball, cricket, or soccer. It may seem that they would
have to solve complex differential equations in their heads to
predict the trajectory of the ball. In fact, players use a simple
heuristic. When a ball comes in high, the player fixates the ball
and starts running. The heuristic is to adjust the running speed so
that the angle of gaze remains constant —that is, the angle
between the eye and the ball. The player can ignore all the
information necessary to compute the trajectory, such as the ball’s
initial velocity, distance, and angle, and just focus on one piece of
nformation, the angle of gaze.
"
Gerd Gigerenzer

24. David Rock's SCARF model
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•
•
•
Status
Certainty
Autonomy
Relatedness
Fairness

29. Reading List
Kahneman - Thinking Fast & Slow
Kurzban - Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite
Seabright - The Company of Strangers
Haidt - The Righteous Mind
Sutherland (Stuart) - Irrationality
Frank - The Darwin Economy
Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational
Thaler & Sunstein - Nudge
Kenrick & Griskevicius - The Rational Animal
@rorysutherland / @ogilvychange