People are not irrational!!! - That includes your customers, your employees, and even yourself...
It is time for us to start moving on from both lists of biases and irrationality in speaking about people and behavior change - because it influences decision making.
I welcome the shift in conversation and thank those who are starting to make emphasis on this - from the recent book Radical Uncertainty that was recommeded to me by Steven Johnson FRSA to this great paper by Laura de Molière, Jens Koed Madsen, Lee de-Wit and colleagues.
We must assume people are rational if we are to create better experiences for the people we are helping with our design.
Here are a few takeaways:
-Critique of Irrationality:
The article critiques the traditional assumption that humans are predictably irrational and that behavior is often judged against an unrealistic standard of perfect rationality - what works in a lab without context is not what works in the real world with actual context.
As stated in the article
"Homo irrationalis is often accompanied by a seductive vocabulary of cognitive biases offering the appearance of a comprehensive explanation which can be appealing in trying to solve complex policy problems. However, this caricature risks being used as a framework to explain behavior in hindsight by retrospectively applying a bias and thereby confecting a misleading impression of explanatory power."
-Reasonableness Framework: The authors propose assuming people are rational by considering their goals and contextual factors. I am all in on working towards this kind of framework!!
The article also talks about responses Climate Change as an example and points out the role of political and social factors rather than individual cognitive biases.
So what could you do?
Build trust and credible plans, address social and political influences (if in policy making), and involve the public, your customers, employees as partners in development and mix methods.
It is time we start moving away from what is "easy to sell" and work on what is right to do, even if it isn't always easy...