Book SummaryAlchemy, by Rory Sutherland

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Alchemy

Throughout our modern age, science and reason have expanded our understanding of the universe and created technological marvels, and yet they’ve proven less successful at predicting and guiding human behavior. Is this because humans are irredeemably irrational creatures? If so, irrationality can be useful as a tool for pushing agendas both big and small—from something as trivial as selling candy bars to something as important as setting national policy.

In Alchemy, published in 2019, Rory Sutherland argues that contemporary economic and political theories are fundamentally flawed in that they hinge on reason as a predictor of human behavior and that any attempts to persuade people using reason are doomed to fail. Instead, Sutherland suggests that to solve economic and political problems, we should lean in to people’s penchant for illogical (and even magical) thinking—not to con the public, but to be more persuasive through an...

Alchemy Summary When Reason Fails

To be clear, Sutherland doesn’t attack logic as a tool for scientific understanding, but he warns against using pure rationalism as the only method for guiding policy and business decisions. Humans, after all, are illogical beings, so any solution to human-centered problems must factor unreason into the equation. In the first section of this guide, we’ll look at the fallacies that commonly occur when applying strict logic to human behavior, why modern economics gets on the wrong track, how human perception differs from objective reality, and why the creation of meaning governs human behavior more than statistics or logical facts.

When we rely on classical logic, we use well-defined data points to reach conclusions and achieve clear-cut objectives. Sutherland points out that the world our brains evolved in is more uncertain than that process allows for. Rationalists like to reduce problems to simple approximations that logic can deal with, but in practice, our minds make judgments based on trade-offs, nuance, and a hazy, big-picture understanding of the world.

The Problem With Simplification

Though Sutherland decries how rationalists simplify issues to fit in...

Alchemy Summary The Uses of Illogic

Sutherland says that in any situation involving human beings, it’s essential to acknowledge and tap into the instinctive, unconscious reasoning behind how people make decisions. Whether you're selling a product, planning a business strategy, or trying to convince people to eat healthier food, the “magic” of unreason can be far more persuasive than logical arguments and facts. Three so-called “irrational” mental processes that we’ll explore include the use of subtle cues to signal trustworthiness, the placebo effect in which the mind can trick the body, and lastly the mind’s tendency to make choices that are “good enough” to achieve a given want, rather than striving for the best possible outcome.

In Signaling We Trust

The first persuasive tool we’ll consider is signaling—the things we do to demonstrate our intent and trustworthiness to others. The human mind uses signals as a shorthand from which to form broader judgments about people, groups, and institutions. By being deliberate about the signals you send, whether or not they seem rational on the surface, you can gain people’s trust and nudge them in favor of whatever message you’re trying to convey, even if...

Alchemy Summary How to Do Magic

Understanding Sutherland’s concepts is different from putting them into practice. The pressure of traditional economics is strong, and to find creative solutions outside it, you have to be willing to experiment with approaches that may seem silly. In this section, we’ll show how some of Sutherland’s ideas might be applied in two fictional scenarios—one in which a business owner is trying to move unsold merchandise, and another in which a local politician is trying to revitalize his town. Their solutions include questioning assumptions, changing perceptions, addressing people’s unconscious motivations, and bringing different ideas together in absurd combinations.

Scenario 1: Blind Date With a Beer

In our first example, Kate is the owner of a local pub. As a beer aficionado, she’s built up a stock of specialty imports from around the world, but unfortunately they haven’t proved as popular as she’d like, and most of her specialty beers sit unsold while her customers buy the more familiar brands over and over. Kate’s empirical data says that her customers aren’t interested in imported beers, despite various displays in her pub that logically explain the merits of each...

Shortform Exercise: How Illogical Are You?

Sutherland contends that our rational minds are subject to the pull of our seemingly irrational unconscious in ways that can be used to “hack” our behaviors and perceptions. Think about the ways that unreason affects your life and whether you see it as a benefit or a drawback.

Are there any people you meet, such as nurses, teachers, or airplane pilots, whom you trust implicitly? What is it about them that signals their trustworthiness? What reasons can you think of (rational or otherwise) that would undermine that trust?