Espresso - Why Jesus Was The First Behavioural Scientist - Rory Sutherland

0:05Since I always say that this slightly annoys my wife when I say Jesus was a behavioural scientist But if you look at things like the parable of the lost sheep, that's actually explaining loss aversion. Quite a lot of the parables in the New Testament are actually very interesting psychological experiments. For example, the parable of the vineyard, where the people who turn up late to work are paid the same as the people who turned up first thing in the morning, and they perceive it as unfair. That's actually, in a sense, the product of someone... Aesop, okay, that's Greece. So a little bit further west.

0:41I think he was in Greece. He was definitely Greek. Aesop is a behavioural scientist, pure and simple. Aesop. The fables, things like the fox and the grapes, sour grapes, the boy who cried wolf. Oh, boy, yeah, yeah, yeah. All of those little stories, which date back to, it's like the 7th or 6th century BC. Yeah. And they're all fantastic insights into, you know, human emotional response to real-world stimuli. What are some of those lessons from those fables? So, I mean, the fox and the grapes is an example where... What happens in the fox and the grapes? So the fox can't reach the grapes and walks away deciding they're kind of sour.

1:20And that's where it comes from, sour grapes. I can't have it, so I pretend I don't want it. OK, that's where the phrase... There's a concomitant phrase called sweet lemons, which is bad things that happen to us inevitably that we decide. You know, like my three years I spent in Leavenworth Penitentiary were really formative. Okay, so we're forced to go through we're forced to go through an experience we don't want and we reframe it in our memory as something that had positive effects. Yeah, okay. Or we we can't have something we want. So we decide effectively that we didn't want it all along. That's that's the sour grapes thing.

1:56Well, those grapes, I mean, they were probably horrible anyway. Okay, now that would be an example of the human brain practicing regret minimization. in other words um i mean there's an interesting thing in regret minimization in consumer psychology which is great phrase was someone working for little woods years ago who told me this and i suddenly realized she was absolutely right she said you never regret your extravagances and part of the reason for that is if you've spent a lot of money on something okay uh it is more important for you for your own mental well-being to believe that it was money well spent and so we tend to we tend to enjoy performances of you know more uh when we've paid quite a lot for the ticket okay it's very hard to go away for a taylor swift concert going well that was shit wasn't it okay thank you so much for listening to that espresso i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and are ready for the day.

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