Behavioural science

I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: ‘In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.’ In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in real life, if something works, you don’t always need a theory to

Once we’ve flattened the curve of infection with mass self-isolation, the next debate will concern how to soften the restrictions on movement and work without causing a second wave of the pandemic. Behavioural science, abused as it has been to date, may be useful in formulating the new rules for social behaviour. That’s because it is no good simply to come up with rules which are optimal in epidemiological terms: such rules might well be too complicated for people to follow, and impossible to encode in habits or social norms. Instead you need cautious rules-of-thumb which are both simple and visible. For rules to work, it helps if it is