This year’s Nudgestock conference took place on the 10th June. The annual festival featured over 24 talks covering a range of thought-provoking themes from a variety of speakers. This year, each talk was colored red, blue, or a light green colour, with red indicating that the talk’s foundation was about ‘trust’ in a time of misinformation, blue indicating that the talk was about anti-trends and why we’re predictable, and green indicating that the talk was about rethinking sustainability.
From discussions on the Metaverse, diversity and vaccinations, there was plenty to keep you entertained throughout the day, I’m going to break down some highlights and a talk from each topic that stood out.
The event was kicked off with Andy Main and Ann Higgins of Ogilvy doing a welcome talk, and closed the day almost 10 hours later with a talk celebrating 10 years of Nudgestock from Ogilvy’s Behavioural Science Practice and Friends.
The first talk that stood out to me was from Dan Pink, an author of five New York Times bestsellers. His talk was named ‘The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward’. Drawing on 60 years of science, and a collection of over 20,000 regrets from 109 countries, Dan explained how to harness our regrets to make better decisions, solve problems more effectively, and find greater meaning in life.
Speaking from his home office in Washington DC, Dan began his presentation with a recalibration towards our way of thinking about regret. He explains that scientists have been studying the emotion for 50/60 years, and throughout the talk highlighted how regret can make us better, and become a useful tool rather than something negative.
A great analogy that stuck out to me how regrets can lead you to better choices. He said:
“Taking that third path between wallowing and ignoring, there’s a pile of research showing how regret can help you negotiate better, solve problems better, avoid cognitive biases and become a better strategist, using it as an engine for going forward.”
He also touched on what people regret, putting together a world regret survey with over 20,000 respondents from around the world. He put people’s responses into categories, starting with foundation regrets: ‘If only i’d done the work.’, next category was boldness regrets: ‘If only i’d taken the chance’, and the third category was ‘if only i’d reached out’. He then went on to reveal what emotion or human need each regret reveals, as a way to pivot your thinking on how regret can change you.
Overall, the talk was extremely perspective shifting and engaging, I think due to the
The day continued with Psychologist Rob Henderson holding a talk named ‘Luxury Beliefs’. The general consensus of the phrase is whereby holding certain ideas and opinions can help to raise your social status. Rob shared the empirical evidence behind the concept and the unseen costs it inflicts on disadvantaged groups.
Starting his talk with a question:
What do Top Hats and Defund the Police have in common?
He begins with some insightful information about where the concept of ‘Luxury Beliefs’ originated from, citing books from Thorstein Veblen as evidence as how when peoples basic needs are met that they then have the freedom to spend more time on cultivating their custom tastes, opinions and habits that the upper class use as a distinction from lower class.
He then highlights Amot Zahavi’s example of this in animals. He says African Gazelle’s engaging in a behaviour called Stotting, springing them in the air to avoid predators, sends the message of: “
Im so fit I can afford to spend valuable energy to show you how strong and robust i am compared to other gazelles.”
So for humans, handbags and top hats are costly symbols for economic capacities and for gazelles stodding is a symbol of physical capacities.
Zahavi’s theory is that humans and animals all flaunt certain symbols and take on costly ways of expressing themselves as a way to obtain distinction from the masses. A difference though is that humans often trickle through to the rest of society which weakens the symbol leading the affluent and rich to abandon it.
He then loops this to “Luxury Beliefs are the new status symbol”, and how these are now ercieved as honest symbols of wealth because they are hard or impossible to fake. NYU Prof Scott Galloway said:
“The strongest brand in the world is not Apple. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford and Stanford. Academics decided we’re no longer public servants, we’re luxury goods”.
These goods are displayed through our ideas and opinions; the affluent are in a better position to afford the consequences. Luxury beliefs can have long term detrimental effects on the working class, however costly they are to the rich they can often have even greater negative effects on everyone else.
A few other highlights from throughout the day included Sylvia Pan talking about how we can use the magic of virtual reality to improve how we connect with one another in the metaverse. Also Matthew Syed and Iain McGilchrist’s talk on Diversity and the difference between cognitive diversity and demographical diversity, and how each have different impacts on work and life.
Overall the festival had an incredible lineup, with non stop engaging content spanning all different corners of behavioural science.