Is the world setting you up for failure?

Think from KERA

KERA

Kera, 071003, Think, Society & Culture, Krysboyd

4.7 • 911 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We recycle and exercise and generally try to do the right thing — but what if it’s not our failings that hold us back, but systems? Nick Chater, professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the limits of what any individual can do when it comes to, say, their health or climate change and to explain why attacking systematic failures is the only way to really achieve large-scale results. His book, written with George Loewenstein, is “It’s on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	If you contribute to climate change by driving a car or using a lot of plastic, if you develop
0:15.3	a lifestyle-related health condition like obesity, if you fail to sock away enough in a 401k to ensure a
0:22.8	comfortable retirement, you can assume plenty of people will blame you for your problems.
0:28.3	You probably blame yourself to a certain extent, the choices you make that fall short of
0:32.7	perfect day-to-day and add up to poor outcomes. But are these things really always the result of individual
0:39.2	failings? From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Certainly the oil industry and the
0:46.8	food industry and the financial services industry would like us to believe that individuals
0:51.4	are driving outcomes on all these fronts. But things change if we start to look at the way systems contribute to human hardships on a
0:58.8	massive scale. And we'd be better off changing the rules of the game than trying to change
1:04.3	the 8.3 billion individual human players. Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioral Science at
1:10.6	the Warwick Business School
1:11.9	and author along with George Lowenstein of the book, It's On You, How Corporations and Behavioral
1:17.2	Scientists have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Nick, welcome
1:22.7	to think. Well, welcome. Thank you very much, Chris. It's so lovely to be here.
1:27.1	You remind us of this PSA that appeared on TV for years. Oh, welcome. Thank you very much, Chris. It's so lovely to be here.
1:39.0	You remind us of this PSA that appeared on TV for years in this country in the 1970s that shows an actor dressed to look like a Native American, crying in all this trashy encounters.
1:45.0	It doesn't seem like a bad idea to remind people not to litter, but who actually paid for those ads?
1:48.0	Yes, rather worryingly, the whole campaign was funded by the US packaging and drinks industry.
1:56.0	So you might think that shows tremendous sort of ethical perspective that they're worried about the problems that the packaging that they produce could cause and they want to help us fix the problem.
2:08.6	I fear, unfortunately, there may be a slightly less charitable interpretation, but maybe more grounded in reality though.
2:15.6	The reality might be that they just didn't want regulation of all the junk that they
2:20.0	were producing to be thrown on the ground?
	...

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