"Most of the stuff in the movie was bollocks."
So said Newcastle academic David Savage as we chatted about his research into risk-taking on the Titanic as it sunk.
Dr Savage, a behavioural economist at the University of Newcastle, examined thousands of pages of testimony from official inquiries into the disaster.
"The idea of women and children first [onto the lifeboats] intrigued me," he said.
He wondered whether it was entirely true.
"When you start to look at the data, you see it was women and children first with a few exceptions. If you were in first class, you had a much better survival rate than those in second and third class," he said.
The Titanic sank in two hours and 40 minutes. Three years later, the Lusitania sank in 18 minutes after being torpedoed by a German U-boat during World War I.
"If you were between 16 and 25, you survived. If you were old or young, you died. It was survival of the fittest," he said.
Dr Savage, an associate professor, said humans need time to socially organise. He gave the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.
"At the start of the pandemic, people were acting in their own self interest," he said.
"Whereas once time goes on, you start to see a community. That's when social norms kick in."
Great Prospect
David Savage has quite the claim to fame.
He was among the first people in the world to confirm Kahneman's prospect theory. Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his work on prospect theory.
The ideas of Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky helped shape the world, sparking revolutions in many sectors including money, medicine, data and sport. Their ideas changed the way humans conceive their own minds.
Kahneman integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.
Dr Savage proved prospect theory with his research into the 2011 floods in Brisbane, which showed that experiencing a disaster can affect people's long-term behaviour.
Prospect theory describes how people choose between different options or prospects and how they estimate - often in a biased or incorrect way - the perceived likelihood of each of these options.
A Little Nudge
Icelandic pop star Bjork sang that "there's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behaviour".
David Savage would, no doubt, agree.
The way governments make policy is wrong when they "don't account for human behaviour", he says.
"Every time we see a major policy that doesn't account for human behaviour fail badly, everybody scratches their head and says in hindsight, 'Why did we think this policy would work?'."
He said government policies are much better when they're designed to account for "the way people actually think, not how you think they'll behave".
He recommends a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in economics three years ago. The book explains how people can be "simultaneously so smart and so dumb".
It's about how to nudge people to do the right thing. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.
Time for fruit at supermarket and service station counters then, hey. Well, at least in place of the chocolate biscuits in our fridges.
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