New understanding of human behaviour is slowly reaching the citadels of policymaking
Despite having a toilet at home, why does a person defecate in the open? As employees become more experienced, why do they become progressively lax in following standard safety procedures? Despite billions of dollars spent on market research, why do the failure rates of new products continue to hover around 90%? These and other discordant human behaviours have remained an enigma for most policymakers and corporate strategists.
As compared to other fields of study, the study of human behaviour is a babe in the woods. The study of physical sciences like physics, chemistry and biology has been in existence for several centuries. In comparison, psychology, the science of human behaviour, saw its impact only during the early 20th century. Theories such as behaviourism, psychoanalysis, humanism, cognitive science, etc., tried unsuccessfully to provide a comprehensive explanation for all human behaviour. Even if one kept aside some of the inherent contradictions between these theories, a combination of all of them still did not provide a coherent understanding of human behaviour. Human behaviour, unlike other sciences, lacked a fundamental theory.
