Crawford Hollingworth says the social versus individual debate misses the point about BE in a recent article on the Marketing Society blog.
Behavioural Economics (BE) is inspiring considerable debate and discussion amongst academics, policymakers, think tanks and industries, not least the marketing industry. One strand of thought is that BE is individualistic in its approach and lacking social insight. For example, in October's Admap Mark Earls and Alex Bentley positioned behavioural economics as follows:
"The newer approaches, such as neuromarketing or behavioural economics, are also essentially individualist - merely new flavours of an old recipe."
However, the RSA's 2011 report 'Transforming Behaviour Change' seeks to show how behavioural economics allows us to approach behavioural understanding and behavioural change in a holistic way, embracing both social and individual contexts and influences equally:
"We cannot change ourselves without changing each other: Most behaviour change does not occur at the level of the individual alone. Not only do we rely on other people to achieve the changes we seek to make, but such behaviours spread through social diffusion,"
BE frameworks and constructs embrace the importance of social influence. Behavioural economists have identified a raft of cognitive biases that drive consumer behaviour within a given choice architecture or situation. Biases can be further grouped into different categories:
- Memory biases: such as peak end rule, recognition bias, self-serving bias.
- Decision-making biases: such as framing, loss aversion, hyperbolic discounting, endowment effect.
- Probability / belief biases: such as availability bias, primacy effect, optimism bias.
- Social biases: social conformity bias, status quo bias, in-group bias, authority bias, projection bias, to name but a few.
Some biases fall into more than one camp - for example commitment bias may sometimes act through social networks and peer pressure, while on other occasions it may act on an individual level via technology or via a sense of who we want to be as a person. To read our full article published on the Marketing Society blog, click here
