Our boilerplate introduction to one-half of this writing duo:
Readers who have been with us for a while know I get a kick out of Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland. He's a first rate marketer and enough of a behavioural scientist to be able to hold his own in conversation with Kahneman.
Additionally, he holds, along with Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger, that most nebulous* of corporate titles: Vice-Chairman.
And here is the mini-bio for the other half of the team:
Pete Dyson was a member of Ogilvy’s behavioral science practice from 2013 to 2020. In 2020, he joined the UK Department for Transport as principal behavioral scientist, tasked with the Covid-19 response, sustainable behavior change, and internal capability building. is also a semi-professional Ironman triathlete and in 2021 broke the record for the fastest non-stop cycle from Land’s End to London. He is the author of Transport for Humans (with Rory Sutherland).
From Behavioral Scientist, November 16, 2021:
When we move things, rather than people, around efficiently, no feelings need to be taken into account. Planning can be mathematically optimized without any consideration of psychology.
For centuries, transport has been a battle of ideologies: the utilitarians versus the romantics. One side strives to optimize journeys against quantifiable measures while the other nostalgically recounts the joys of travel.
We aim for a more balanced position. We argue that society’s present focus on utilitarian efficiency has run its course and that the romantic view of travel needs to be updated to make transport simpler, more inclusive, and sustainableIt’s common to hear that transport providers are “simply getting people from A to B”: a low-bar ambition that misses the real purpose of much travel. Imagine if other sectors adopted the same reductionism: if cafes were just about the efficient delivery of calories; if hotels focused solely on their number of beds per square meter; or if health care were solely about longevity, not the reduction of pain. Each of these sectors has certainly experimented with strategies based exclusively on speed and efficiency, and sometimes they’ve gained a short-term competitive advantage by doing so, but it rarely works out well in the long run. Establishing what this all means for transport involves thinking less like an economist and more like a real customer.
Introducing Homo transporticus
Homo economicus, a long-running academic joke, refers to an idealized species of beings who make decisions using rational cost-benefit analysis in an environment of perfect trust, fully aware of all the available options, acting purely in their own self-interest. Outside of academia these conditions exist rarely, if ever.
Look around you at any bus stop, on any train platform or in any traffic queue and you’ll quickly understand that Homo economicus would be a bad avatar for passengers, commuters, customers, drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. But, for many reasons, Homo economicus is often invoked when we design transportation.
More precisely, transport designers have fabricated a new species: Homo transporticus, a cousin of economic man. Homo transporticus is naturally selected to use modern transportation, with abilities that include a full awareness of the modes of travel available, an encyclopedic knowledge of routes and timetables, the ability to navigate them without hindrance, and the ability to compare two options and always choose between them in a way that a planner would consider to be rational. Homo transporticus has stable preferences, makes lightning-fast calculations about cost, convenience, and travel time, and always chooses better options when they are available.
Certainly, some avid transport enthusiasts aspire to this kind of mastery: memorizing timetables, seating configurations, traffic light timings, and countless more hacks and workarounds. That the system attracts and rewards such dedication reveals its shortcomings. It shouldn’t be this way. Transport is for all humans, not just the ones who are keen enough and foolish enough to spend hours researching, memorizing, and perfecting their trip.
Why we go beyond Homo transporticus
Homo transporticus is an idealized traveler—what economists would call a “representative agent.” Average in every way. These simplifications can simplify demand forecasting, price modeling, and cost-benefit analyses of new infrastructure, but they leave out much that is important. For instance, our physiology, psychology, and differences in mobility.....
....MUCH MORE
Previously from Behavioral Scientist: "Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge"
Some of our prior visits with Mr. Sutherland:
- Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland: "The Next Revolution Will Be Psychological Not Technological"
- Looking For A Last Minute Gift? Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland Has An Idea
- Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland Has Some Thoughts
- Behavioral Econ.:"Advertising and the Death of Don Draper"
- Ogilvy & Mather UK Vice-Chair Rory Sutherland on Driverless Showers
