Humanizing Rules

CHAPTER 5INTRODUCING BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE

In this and Chapters 6–8, I introduce some basic Behavioural Science concepts. Readers familiar with the discipline may wish to skip these chapters and move straight to Part II.

Behavioural Science

As a child, my parents always encouraged me to be curious. That meant I constantly asked questions, usually ones that started with the word “why”. The primary focus of my questions was an attempt to understand other people and what motivated their behaviour. Why, I would ask, was that person wearing those clothes? Why were those people crossing the road when the traffic light was red? My parents would patiently answer as best they could.

I think childhood curiosity partly led me to study French and German literature at university. I didn't know it then, but in hindsight, the fact that literature explores humans and their decisions attracted me to that field of study. We don't write stories about objects; we write them about people. Or, in the case of fairy tales, we sometimes write them about animals or creatures that are anthropomorphised; in other words, given human characteristics. I was, and remain, particularly fascinated by authors such as Sartre and Kafka, whose stories reveal much about the human brain and why we make choices.

As you'll have detected in the way I told the Cullinan and Adoboli stories in the Introduction, that curiosity hasn't gone away. I'm still fascinated by what makes people “tick”. This is why when I first heard ...