Rotman Management

AT ITS CORE, every organization is in the same business: changing behaviour. For-profit companies try to sway consumers to buy their products; governments try to convince citizens to pay their taxes on time; and an NGO might want to encourage familie

Dr. David Rock and his colleagues at the Neuroleadership Institute have developed the SEEDS Model, which shows that biases fall into five key categories. Below are samples for each catagory. In-group Bias: Perceiving people who are similar to you (in

Carla O’Dell: Why don’t we make better decisions? Chip Heath: Psychologists have spent a number of years studying all of the biases we have, and they’ve found that there are a number of basic ways we think about the world that lead us to the wrong co

Usman Hayat: What is the ‘right way’ to think about money? Dan Ariely: The right way is all about opportunity cost. Every time you buy something — a cup of coffee, a car, a house — you should be asking, ‘What am I giving up now, and in the future, fo

Once turned into practice, the science of human feedback will transform the way we think about the skills we value most, but feel most pessimistic about being able to learn or teach: The social, emotional and relational skills that modern businesses

Like most of you, I consider myself an honourable member of society: Trustworthy, honest and moral. Yet I don’t always act accordingly — and judging by the magnitude of insurance fraud, tax deception and the illegal downloading of music, films and ga

GREG IS A 28-YEAR OLD HR MANAGER living in Phoenix, Arizona. He’s got a Master’s degree in Labour Relations, a salary in excess of $100,000 a year and a lot of ambition. In fact, he’s got a list of 22 goals — personal and professional — that he regul

Figuring out what consumers truly value these days is no easy feat. Describe how you discovered 30 ‘elements of value’. My colleagues and I have been studying consumers for many years. After literally hundreds of studies, about three years ago we con

In your research, you have found that investor risk appetites vary by season. How so? As daylight becomes less abundant in the fall and winter months, our moods respond accordingly. Many people can identify with the notion of ‘winter blues’; but at a

WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE more successful than others? One obvious answer is talent; another is opportunity. But even people who have comparable levels of talent and opportunity often enjoy strikingly different levels of success. Applying the scientific me

MOST OF US RECOGNIZE THAT, generally speaking, people fear change and the unknown. We prefer familiar goods and people, status quo choices, and gambles that seem unambiguous. What some people might not realize is that these effects are not only manif

You believe that the ability to ‘read other people’ is the human brain’s greatest asset. Please explain. This ability — which I also call our social sense or sixth sense — enables us to achieve life’s most important goal: connecting with other human

Evolutionarily speaking, the focus for Homo sapiens is on the here and now. Describe how the focus of Homo Economicus differs. As the name implies, Homo Economicus is an invention of economists. The assumption is that, as information processors and d

The World Bank’s Global INsights Initiative (GINI) was formed to put the key findings of your World Development Report into practice. Please summarize those findings. The main message that came out of that report was that development policy is due fo

You have found that people don’t always have well-defined preferences—and that we often ‘make up the rules’ for a decision on the spot. Describe how this works. When people make choices, they don’t simply refer to a ‘master list’ of preferences in th

AROUND THE WORLD, many countries are facing an obesity epidemic. In the U.S. alone, obesity rates have more than doubled in the past two decades, to a prevalence rate greater than 20 per cent; and the Canadian rate is virtually the same. Although obe

Prioritizing is usually seen as an individual skill that some are good at, others not so much. We prioritize whenever we think about how we will spend our time today, this week, this month — or this year. But the fact is, prioritizing is also a key o

WHEN YOU FIRST SEE THE FLIES, it’s a bit unsettling. Your first reaction is that the washroom you are in is unhygienic; but you soon realize that the flies in the urinals of the men’s room at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport aren’t real: They are only im

NO ONE WOULD EVER DISPUTE that Cal Chambers was the smartest guy in the room, least of all Cal. As Chief Science Officer of Obsidian Pharmaceuticals, Cal holds multiple patents and has been responsible for developing the core biological platform on w

How do you define ‘nudge marketing’? Nudge marketing is all about structuring a consumer choice environment to get the consumer to do a certain thing. The issue is, we can think about ‘consumer behaviour’ as a series of single decisions or actions; o