If a baseball and a bat cost $1.10 together, and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?
Solution
5 cents. System 1 thinking often leads to mistakes in this type of problem.
A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” How is that possible?
Solution
The surgeon is the boy’s mother. This puzzle illustrates the persistence of gender discrimination.
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Solution
47 days. To answer correctly, you need to ignore your system 1 and use your system 2.
Alan is smart, hard-working, impulsive, stubborn and jealous.
Ben is jealous, stubborn, impulsive, hard-working and smart.
Who should you hire?
Solution
They are the same, but a priming effect often make people prefer the first candidate.
04-09-2020
As the field is getting more mature and the community is growing, we have seen some behaviors damaging the reputation of behavioral science. Even the best can give into temptations. What other battles between vice and virtue have you witnessed?
Pride: Pontificating on the power of behavioural science, and being perceived as condescending when labelling “nudgees” as irrational, lazy, biased, or herdy… as if we were above or immune to it.
Gluttony: Inventing a new quirky bias to explain retrospectively whatever behaviour, up to faking data to make a catchy story, instead of acknowledging the limits of our understanding
Greed: Claiming concepts paternity, defending siloed knowledge (neuro, socio, ethno, experimental, evolutionary…), instead of building new bridges to address the complexity of human behaviour
Sloth: Commenting on the world from the office and the books, instead of challenging assumptions in the field and listening to the wisdom -not just the biases- of people doing things that work there.
Lust: Seeking prestige, and privilege of influencing political power whatever the topic, instead of staying humble and and collaborating with other stakeholders.
Wrath: Blaming some for not doing real science, or others for ignoring how things work in business, instead of acknowledging that these two worlds have different purpose but can cross-fertilize.
Envy: focusing on peers, and looking for fame in a small community, instead of getting the outside world to know more about the great things BeSci can do!
References:
– https://peoplescience.maritz.com/Articles/2020/Beware-Dollar-Store-Behavioral-Economics
21-01-22
This article was written by Richard Bordenave, CEO of BVA Nudge Consulting Singapore and Divya Radhakrishnan, an Applied Behavioural Scientist who works […]