Alchemy: On Logic, the Unconscious, and How We Really Think

Alchemy - by Rory Sutherland

A book anchored in business, advertising, and marketing research, but its deeper contribution is to a line of thought I am seeking to better understand: how we think and what influences our thinking, from individual psychological forces to broader social and cultural ones.

This book speaks primarily to individual psychological behaviour but raises important questions about the cultural and social forces that shape how we operate, both as individuals and collectively.

The main thread is that most of us interpret and explain the world through logic, even when much of what drives behaviour operates beneath it.

Rory Sutherland draws an important distinction between logic and the deeper motivations behind our behaviours, ones that exist outside our conscious awareness and often remain out of reach:

So there are logical problems, such as building a bridge. And there are psycho-logical ones: whether to paint the lines on the road or not. The rules for solving both are different; just as I make a distinction between nonsense and non-sense, I also use a hyphen to distinguish between logical and psycho-logical thinking. The logical and the psycho-logical approaches run on different operating systems and require different software, and we need to understand both. Psycho-logic isn't wrong, but it cares about different things and works in a different way to logic. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

On the dominance of logical thinking

This book highlights the tendency, especially among business leaders, to place excessive weight on a logical and rational worldview. This is pervasive in how we approach problem solving, something I had written about earlier in relation to deductive dominant thinking.

Our need for logic and certainty may prevent us from seeing less logical, or what Sutherland calls more magical, solutions. Because we lean toward logical problem solving, we are often missing what may seem like irrational solutions because nobody is looking for them. In a business context, logic wins. Clean, explanatory, rational explanations and business cases are what get through.

Alongside the inarguably valuable products of science and logic, there are also hundreds of seemingly irrational solutions to human problems just waiting to be discovered, if only we dare to abandon standard-issue, naïve logic in the search for answer. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

Unfortunately, because reductionist logic has proved so reliable in physical sciences, we now believe it must be applicable everywhere - even in the much messier field of human affairs. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practice magic, or even experiment with it. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

Where this leads me

• Institutional and cultural environments condition us toward logic as the dominant mode of thought, and this becomes self-perpetuating. What isn't logical gets sidelined, reinforcing the loop. The need to explain and justify decisions keeps pulling us back toward the rational. As AI and technology increase pressure toward measurable, explainable outputs, this dynamic may deepen further.

On what we cannot see in ourselves

We ask people to explain behaviour that originates somewhere they cannot access.

Business leaders and market researchers frame questions through a logical, rational lens, expecting people to have introspective access to motivations that are largely unconscious.

The trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

People simply do not have introspective access to their motivations. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

Because people have limited insight into what drives their behaviour, observing behaviour directly is more insightful than asking about it.

There are often two reasons behind people's behaviour: the ostensibly logical reason, and the real reason. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

Learning how to disentangle the literal from the lateral meaning is essential to solving cryptic crosswords, and it is also essential to understanding human behaviour. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

But the fact that we can deploy reason to explain our actions post-hoc does not mean that it was reason that decided on that action in the first place, or indeed that the use of reasons can help obtain it. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

Where this leads me

• If we lack introspective access to our own motivations, what does that mean for the stories we construct about our own thinking? Going deeper requires self-awareness that is genuinely rare. Jungian psychology speaks to this directly, placing confrontation with the unconscious as a precondition for understanding oneself, and from there, others.

On context

Context is consistently stripped out of rational models, yet it may be the most important variable of all.

Context is often the most important thing in determining how people think, behave and act: this simple fact dooms many universal models from the start. Because in order to form universal laws, naïve rationalists have to pretend that context doesn't matter. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

Where this leads me

• Context shapes thinking far more than we acknowledge, in ourselves and in how we read others. Attribution theory identifies the tendency to attribute other people's behaviour to their character while putting less weight to their situation, what social psychology calls the fundamental attribution error. Recognizing context as a primary force reframes both self-understanding and how we interpret the behaviour of others.

On conformity and the outlier

Many of us gravitate toward conformity, driven by evolutionary instincts around group belonging and social acceptance. This pull toward the average can quietly constrain thinking and narrow what we consider worth pursuing.

Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones. By contrast, it is perfectly possible that conventional market research has, over the past fifty years, killed more good ideas than it has spawned, by obsessing with a false idea of representativeness. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

The fatal issue is that logic always gets you to exactly same place as everyone else. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

We approach most problems as though they are purely logical, leaving little room for human subjectivity, yet subjectivity is rarely absent from the equation.

The reason we do not ask basic questions is because, once our brain provides a logical answer, we stop looking for better ones; with a little alchemy, better answers can be found. (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

Where this leads me

• How much of our thinking is simply the first logical answer our brain found, and we stopped there? The harder question is how to recognize when you are at the limits of your own thinking. Knowing there might be more is itself an awareness that doesn't come naturally.