Tali Sharot

Part of our daily job is to affect others: we advise our clients, guide our patients, teach our children, and inform our online followers. Yet science shows we systematically fall into suboptimal habits when trying to change others, from insisting the other person is wrong to exerting control. Drawing on her award-winning book, The Influential Mind, Tali Sharot explains how an attempt to influence succeeds only when it's matched to the core elements that govern how we think and feel. Tali shows why data and numbers alone can be a weak approach to influence and why emotion and narrative often have a stronger impact. By understanding the minds and brains of those around us, we get better at advising and communicating information.

Change, uncertainty, and unrest have taken a toll on people's well-being. Stress, depression, and anxiety are on the rise, directly affecting physical health and productivity. What can we do at work and at home to improve the mental health of colleagues, employees, and customers? What can we do to induce happiness? Tali Sharot's answers draw on research in neuroscience, behavioral economics, and psychology. She covers the joy of anticipation and the pain of dread, why a sense of agency matters for well-being, and the perils of social comparison. Tali explains why the mind uses a 'grayscale' to perceive the world and how we might turn it off to see in color again.

Even stimulating jobs, breathtaking works of art, and exciting new gadgets lose their sparkle after a while. We desensitize to what's wonderful around us. We also stop noticing what's not so great: cracks in a relationship, a culture of fraud that developed slowly within a company, or the gradual rise of misinformation. It isn't that we're lazy or stupid. Our brains evolved to respond to what's new and different, not to things that are constant or change gradually. Drawing on Look Again, her book with Cass Sunstein, Tali Sharot shows how this leads us to miss what needs fixing and stop feeling joy in what's good, and how we can 'dishabituate' to see both clearly again.

A major goal of managers and companies is to induce behavioral change. We want to influence the actions of our clients, employees, and colleagues in positive ways. Tali Sharot has advised some of the world's largest companies, including Pepsi, Bank of America, and Prudential, on how to do exactly that. In this presentation, Tali shares which factors, according to science, have the largest impact on people's actions, and why. Using her own research, she explains how to use innate human tendencies to nudge people in the right direction and which common approaches often backfire. The audience learns practical ways to induce change and gains a deeper understanding of human behavior.

Making good decisions is key to the success of any company and a critical skill for leaders and investors. Yet making wise choices, whether about finances, business, or health, is difficult. Human decision-making is rife with bias, from overconfidence to irrational optimism and future discounting. The good news is that understanding where people go wrong lets us improve the decision-making process. Tali Sharot works at the intersection of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, turning up-to-date research in decision science into practical insight. In this lively talk, Tali helps the audience identify systematic decision-making errors and offers practical methods to correct them.