How to train elephants, drink less and lose weight

Rory Sutherland

Binary laws are somehow harder to break than quantitative ones. Jonathan Haidt describes the control of our conscious over our unconscious mind as like "a rider on an elephant": the rider cannot get an elephant to do something which it does not want to do.

How to train elephants, drink less and lose weight

Rory SutherlandOgilvy

Rory Sutherland explains why it is easier to change behaviour by using simple rules than by using rational argument.

"And Jesus went into the desert for forty days and forty nights, and there ate modestly of a low-calorie diet, with some special low-fat falafel, which he had found at a shop just off the Jericho bypass."

You don't get that in the Bible. In fact, biblical folk don't diet at all. They fast. Religious law, you'll notice, tends to be binary and prescriptive – it isn't generally quantitative...

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