Rory Sutherland

What happened to common sense?

Well, this is the argument being that your fellow countryman, what's his name?

Rolston Saul, John Rolston Saul.

Have you come across him?

No.

You Canadians totally underrate yourselves.

You produce wonderful people.

And you're always trying to import people like me from the UK or people from the US.

John Ralston Saul wrote this book, which I think is called Voltaire's Bastards.

And he argues that human brains have evolved with a variety of mental capabilities, only one of which is the capacity for reason.

There's also the capacity for imagination, creativity, common sense, you know, etc.

We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species.

And yet we've made rationality

the gold standard.

This is what's weird about working in advertising, by the way, and I think it's probably similar to theoretical physics, and it's probably similar to entrepreneurialism, okay, which is what's unusual about those fields is that rationality is the bronze standard.

In advertising, if someone says, you know, this is the problem, and you come up with a completely rational solution,

People don't go, right, that's perfect, let's go and do it, as they would do in a finance setting or a compliance setting.

In most of decision-making in institutions, rationality, i.e.

quality of argumentation, is the gold standard.

In advertising, if you came up with a rational ad, people would go, yeah, that's all right, but can you do a bit better?