Only one thing

Decisions invariably involve costs and benefits. Sometimes we trade these off, but at other times it seems as if there is only one thing that matters. And that is not always such a good thing

To understand people’s behaviour, you need to observe the choices and decisions they make. You can look at the members of your household, your friends and relatives, your colleagues, or even random strangers. Well-written literature and drama too can provide rewarding source material to give insight in what drives people’s behaviour. Straddled between real people and scripted drama is reality TV. One genre that particularly explores the boundaries of normal behaviour — in the sense of ‘reasonably close to the norm’ — comprises TV series like Police Interceptors, Traffic Cops and Motorway Cops. They follow police officers trying to apprehend miscreants on Britain’s roads, providing entertainment and education to the student of human behaviour of the type, “what on earth possessed the driver to choose to do that?”

Let us step back in time to the 1960s, when famed economist Gary Becker published his classic paper, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. It lays the foundation for the concept of the rational criminal, who weighs up the costs, risks and benefits of committing a…