There’s this myth in our culture that scientists and “experts” spend long nights using cold logic in the lab examining evidence and drinking stale coffee from Styrofoam cups–all so that they can make your life better.

What’s closer to reality, unfortunately, is that a lot of these guys are grifters trying to make a name for themselves.

If it means fudging the data, so be it.

If it means trying to hit the lottery with a seqsy “discovery”, all the better.

Recently a popular study in the world of life hacks seems to have been debunked.

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A Famous Honesty Researcher Is Retracting A Study Over Fake Data

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Apparently, the primary researcher on a study on dishonesty was….dishonest about some of his findings!

One of the main “findings” of this researcher was that if people sign honesty pledges on forms, they are more likely to be honest.

Whether or not this specific conclusion is true doesn’t interest me as much as the wider implications about the social sciences.

Which is this: The desire of social scientists to find a grand unified theory for human behavior is a pipe-dream.

It’s something that the great Rory Sutherland talks a lot about.

What you’re doing when you try and make something a science is you look for universal, context -free laws.

Take physics, for example. The laws of gravity behave (with slight differences) more or less the same whether you’re in Seattle or Sudan . These “laws” aren’t location dependent or context dependent.

For example, it didn’t matter what the context was: When I acted up as a kid and my Mom wanted to throw a sandal at me, the sandal acted predictably.

A major problem behavioral scientists are seeing, according to Sutherland, is the replication crisis. A lot of experiments don’t faithfully replicate

But the replication crisis isn’t a problem for marketers. As a matter of fact, savvy marketers know that the more universal mechanisms a popular book claims, the more likely it’s bunk.

Sutherland goes so far as to say that the fact that tiny contextual differences can make something true or false Is what marketers care most about

So, if you want your marketing to attract high-quality leads, you’’ll care less about hacking secret “universal laws” of human behavior and more about building a marketing plan that understands people don’t always make “rational” choices and that their choices are context dependent.

That’s why I’ll always give more weight to the hard-won experiences of a grumpy, cigar-chomping ad man over anything a “researcher” desperate for intellectual validation might spout.

P.S. My book shows business owners and entrepreneurs the exact steps for using creativity to make lots of money. It costs around $30 everywhere else, but if you join my daily email list by clicking the link below, you can have a digital copy for free.

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