This read came up in conjunction with taking a certificate on behavioural economics. It’s essentially a business handbook, a reference of sorts that is designed to quickly guide the reader through a series of 25+ ways in which human decision making is biased, and how that affects how business can be conducted.
Since we treated the course material as a direct input source for coming up with new projects for work, it was a totally awesome read.
That’s how this book should be consumed. When wanting to supercharge some communication, or a design process, or a business model, it’s an excellent way to cover a lot of ground quickly.
I won’t try to run through the biases, or drop a table of contents. They’re the same sort you could get by googling “list of biases” or similar. What the book does well is not the list, but the small series of examples that accompanies each chapter – and those really require a re-read if they’re to properly kickstart a creative process.
The author’s own experience seems solid, with many experiments conducted to replicate findings in old behavioural economics work. The field is young, and developing at a fast clip, so the author can really contribute to developing the body of research, and has done so.
The actual content is similar to things like Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Nudge, but in less of an academically rigorous format, and more application-ready.