Core Insights: Behavioural Science

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Self-driving cars have been promised as the future for the last decade with various manufacturers experimenting with their own designs alongside tech giants Google, Uber and Apple. Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, has been trying to model the trickiest task for autonomous vehicles of navigating the cluttered and narrow roads of the UK's towns and cities. But he admits to Core Insights host Trevor Barnes that it is an impossible task and he now believes self-driving vehicles will need their own roads rather than mixing with human controlled cars. Read more on the problems for autonomous vehicles here.

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Chengwei Liu, Associate Professor of Strategy and Behavioral Science, talks about his research into luck with Core Insights host Trevor Barnes. Dr Liu reveals the situations and reasons why we have a bias towards luck, underestimating our good luck and overestimating bad luck. This bias can be exploited by firms alive to the opportunities that luck brings. Read more about it here.

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Andrea Isoni, Professor of Behavioural Science, joins Core Insights host Trevor Barnes to discuss the conundrum of pay rises. Professor Isoni has used game theory to examine how pay rises are actually reciprocated by employees. For many bosses giving workers a pay rise is seen as an act of kindness that they expect to be reciprocated by more effort. But Professor Isoni details the scenarios that show this is rarely the case. Read more on it all here.

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Trevor Barnes, host of Core Insights, interviews Neil Stewart, Professor of Behavioural Science, about a nudge - or sludge - that he discovered on his credit card statement. Anchoring is a well-established nudge with plenty of research confirming its existence. Here, Professor Stewart explains how it is affecting our credit card bill thanks to the minimum payment. For more on this, read Professor Stewart's article here.

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Core Insights host Trevor Barnes talks to Daniel Read, Professor of Behavioural Science, about his research into intertemporal choices, which looks at why, even though we are on a diet, we choose to eat a cream bun now, rather than wait for our lunchtime salad. Or why in repeated experiments people would prefer £10 now rather than £15 in two weeks. These are intertemporal trade-offs and despite economics teaching us we should weigh up the options, calculating the benefits between the two points in time and choosing the most beneficial, we don’t always do this in a way that is best for us, or for society. You can see it playing out at every climate change conference, where hard choices to curb emissions are put off for another day. Professor Read also reveals research on a way to make us more patient and take the better, but further away, option - by simply adding a zero. Read more on this here.