Rory Sutherland

How to bag the best spot in the supermarket car park

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Our local Sainsbury’s, though admirable in every other way, has a slightly inflated estimate of the disabled population of Seven-oaks, with all the plum parking spaces near the entrance reserved for blue badge holders. Every time I drive in, a voice from my inner bastard says: ‘Jeez, if it weren’t for all these bloody disabled spaces, I’d be able to park right next to the door.’ This of course is rubbish, because if those spaces were not designated as disabled, other people would have parked in them first.

It is a perfect example of asymmetry of perception. In fact, next time you go shopping, it might pay to adopt the trademark Sutherland method of superstore parking, which is to park as close as possible to one of the trolley return points in the car park. You’ve never done this? That’s asymmetry of perception again: your mind was focused on minimising the first journey you had to make while completely neglecting the second.

It paid us in evolutionary terms to notice unusual phenomena more than everyday events

It is vital to understand these hidden asymmetries precisely because we are blind to their effects. And without such awareness it is impossible to understand the wonky relationship between objective reality and human perception. For as long as we neglect this, many social and political problems become impossible to solve, or else lead to costly misdirected effort in our futile attempts to solve them.

A few months ago I wrote about the phenomenological problem with smart motorways, which is that their benefits are invisible: no one notices a traffic jam that doesn’t happen. Speaking to the editor of Highways News recently, I heard of a related problem: those seemingly gratuitous 50mph limits imposed on random stretches of motorway often serve to prevent a traffic jam from forming ahead.

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