Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behaviour, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
Sway is a slim, stylish book that is self-consciously part of a trend. Like Blink and Freakonomics, it looks at the science of decision-making, taking obscure academic studies and applying them to everyday life. It shares with those books the breezy, anecdotal style that should probably be called Gladwell-esque. But the one-word title that Sway bears most similarity to is Nudge, the latest publication from University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler.
Along with the economist Daniel Kahneman, whose Nobel-prizewinning prospect theory is predictably referenced here, Thaler is the godfather of behavioural economics. This is hot stuff right now, as President Obama showed when he enlisted Thaler to plan his new stimulus package. So Sway comes along at a good time — hence perhaps its status as an ‘international bestseller’.
The central claim of behavioural economics is that it goes one better than normal economics by replacing the much-maligned ‘rational man’ with a more psychologically accurate figure. Sway is full of examples of behaviour that overturn the standard economic model, from oversensitive egg-shoppers to managers who pick the wrong candidate at interview. If only these individuals had known about the ‘sways’ influencing their behaviour, Ori and Rom Brafman argue, they would have been less likely to make mistakes: ‘By better understanding the seductive pull of these forces, we’ll be less likely to fall victim to them in future’.
The Brafman brothers are lively guides to the field, but their language is odd, to say the least. All too often, they seem to be working on the assumption that irrational equals bad, rational good. So sways ‘derail’ us; we are ‘vulnerable’ to them. In one lengthy passage, they are compared to riptides, pulling us out to sea. Thank goodness, then, for psychologists and neuroscientists: they’ll stop us heading in the wrong direction. Pity they can’t also tell us where we’re going.
Ori Brafman is a businessman, Rom a practising psychologist, and it is precisely at the intersection of management and medicine that this thinking is born. For the mind-doctor as much as the MBA, life is a question of efficiency. One turns maladjusted individuals into productive workers; the other turns raw materials into final products. They share a conviction that the world is measurable, definable, manageable. They also share a disregard for ultimate goals, concerning themselves only with technique: the ‘how’, not the ‘why’.
Chapter Five of Sway describes an experiment which asked a group of men to cross one of two bridges, then measured their responses to the female research assistant waiting for them at the end. The men who crossed the shaky rope bridge found her much more attractive than those who strolled across the stable wooden one. It is a cute experiment, and the Brafmans use it neatly to show how anxiety alters our mindset. But the moment they start talking about messy old feelings, their patter sounds very hollow.
Behavioural economics is meant to offer a more realistic picture of human life. But here, as so often, emotions are merely being weighed — by crude neurophysiology, most flagrantly — to be fitted into another equation. ‘We are all more likely to fall in love when we feel in danger’, the back of Sway tells us. Aah — so that’s how it works.
Reading the section about the bridges, one could easily get the impression that the Brafmans view love as nothing more than an unfortunate irrationality, an impediment to effective economic functioning. But, frankly, I doubt they have thought about it that much. They happily take it for granted that efficiency is always good — and that behavioural biases like ‘excessive commitment’ are things we would all be better off without.
Sway claims to bring a new dimension to ‘traditional economic theory’ (traditional, tellingly, used as a synonym for outdated). But this is more of the same. The defects of the old model are obvious, and tidily accounted for here. The real question, the question we are all asking now, is glaringly absent. Wondering what exactly economic activity is for? Don’t expect this book to tell you.
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