Oh, behave

In an opinion article in yesterday’s Times, Daniel Finkelstein writes about how “group identity is just as important as economic incentive in the way we behave”.

Ideas like this about human behaviour and how it affects our understanding of society and economics are working their way into the mainstream. There seems to be a growing realisation among those who have to try to understand and change people’s behaviour that it’s quite a lot weirder and less rational than we all thought. Finkelstein explored similar issues in a BBC radio report about ‘the science of persuasion’ last year.

We’ll be looking at new thinking on human behaviour, and what it means for market research, in the February issue of Research.