Advertising executive and author
Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive who founded the behavioural science practice at Ogilvy and served as president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. His book Alchemy argues that the most powerful ideas in marketing and human behaviour are often profoundly irrational, drawing on insights from psychology and behavioural economics.
by Rory Sutherland
Sutherland, an ad executive turned behavioural evangelist, argues that the biggest breakthroughs in branding, policy, and design come from psycho-logic, not logic, and that ideas which look irrational on paper often outperform optimized ones. He champions counterintuitive nudges (making trains feel faster, not actually faster) as the highest-leverage levers in business and life.
The books Rory Sutherland references, cites, and recommends most frequently.
by Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman reveals that our minds run on two systems: fast intuition and slow deliberation. Most errors in judgement come from trusting System 1 when the situation demands System 2's careful analysis.
by Richard Thaler
Thaler and Sunstein argue that small changes in how choices are presented, nudges, can dramatically improve decisions without restricting freedom. Choice architecture is a powerful tool for public policy and beyond.
by Richard Thaler
Thaler recounts building behavioural economics by cataloging how real humans deviate from rational-actor theory. Mental accounting and the endowment effect reshaped policy and finance.
by Dan Ariely
Ariely demonstrates through experiments that human irrationality is not random but systematic and predictable. Understanding these patterns reveals why we make the same costly mistakes repeatedly.
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb argues that rare, unpredictable events drive history far more than gradual trends. Our models systematically underestimate extreme outcomes, with devastating consequences.
Who Rory draws from, and who draws from Rory — aggregated across every book in this collection. Counts show the number of citation links, not the depth of each one.