The Housefly Effect

An accessible, fun and practical introduction to behavioural science, featuring insightful examples from the laboratory, advertising and marketing, as well as from daily life.

How do house flies help save millions of euros? How do the layout of casinos keep you gambling?

We are not nearly as rational as we'd like to think - every day we overestimate our ability to resist temptation.

Effective advertising experts use this to nudge us, making the most of our natural behaviour to get the results they want.

In order to process the millions of decisions we make each day, our brains take shortcuts. We are fooled by drugs that don't contain active ingredients, traffic light buttons that aren't connected, and the obsolete 'save' feature in MS Word - these are all examples of placebos that can be surprisingly reassuring. There are countless things that affect our behaviour: reward and punishment, beauty and attraction, and the human tendency to follow the crowd.

The Housefly Effect reveals how to recognize some of the things that affect our behaviour everyday and how we can use this knowledge to our advantage.

It offers an accessible, fun and practical introduction to behavioural science and features insightful examples from the laboratory, advertising, and marketing - as well as from daily life.

Sometimes the smallest things can have a surprisingly large effect on your behaviour.