Tali Sharot

Tali Sharot a leading expert on behavioural bias, decision-making, influence, and motivation.

Her ground-breaking work at the intersection of behavioural economics, psychology and neuroscience has been used by businesses to improve leadership skills, rethink messaging and refine strategy. 

Her books – The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others and The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain – have been widely praised, by the New York Times, Time magazine, Forbes, The Huffington Post and more. Her latest book, co-authored with Cass Sunstein is called “Look Again” The Power of Noticing What Was Always There” was published in February 2024.

Richard Stengel wrote in a Time editorial that “Sharot’s work gives us a better grip on how we function in reality.”

Tali is renowned for her discovery of the neural underpinnings of human optimism, work that has been published in numerous eminent journals. The implications of her discoveries for health, finance, cyber security, policy and more have been extensively covered by the media and she is often featured on radio, and in the written press.

In 2017 her book The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others was published highlighting the critical role of emotion in influence and the weakness of data. It was selected as a Best Book of 2017 by Forbes, The Times UK and The Huffington Post.

Tali delivers engaging talks that are simultaneously lively and informative –explaining deep ideas about human behaviour in a simple way and highlighting how those insights can be implemented in a range of fields including finance, marketing, health and public policy.

Her TED talks have been viewed over 13 million times in total.

Behavioural Bias, Decision Making & Influence

A repeated guest on CNN, The Today Show, MSNBC, co-presented BBC’s Science Club.
Her speaking audiences also include Google, Microsoft, The European Parliament, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, Citibank, Deloitte & Touche, Johnson & Johnson and the World Economic Forum, among many others. She has written for top publications including TIME magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post and the New York Times.

She is on the faculty of MIT (Brain and Cognitive Sciences) and UCL (Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Department of Psychology) where she directs the Affective Brain Lab.

TALI’S TALKS

BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE: The Business of Moving Others

A major goal of managers and companies is to induce behavioural change. We want to influence the actions of our clients, employees, and colleagues in positive ways. Tali has advised some of the world largest companies, including Pepsi, Bank of America and Prudential, on how to do exactly that. In this engaging, thoughtful, and humorous presentation she shares which factors – according to science – have the largest impact on peoples’ actions, and why. Using her own cutting-edge research, she explains how we can use innate human tendencies to nudge people in the right direction, and which commonly used approaches often back-fire. The audience learn powerful practical applications for inducing change and gains a deeper understanding of human behaviour.

LEADING with INFLUENCE: Using Data, Emotion and Narrative

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 on to suboptimal habits when trying to change others– from insisting the other is wrong to exerting control. Based on her award-winning book, The Influential Mind, internationally acclaimed behavioural neuroscientist, Tali Sharot, explains how an attempt to influence will be successful only if it is well-matched with the core elements that govern how we think and feel. Tali explains why providing data and numbers alone can be a weak approach to influence and why emotions and narrative often have strong impact. By understanding the minds and brains of those around us, we become better at advising and communicating information.

WISE CHOICE: Making Better Decisions Using Behavioural Economics

Making good decisions is key to the success of any company and a critical skill for leaders and investors. Yet, making wise choices, whether regarding finances, business or health, are difficult. We now know that human decision-making is rife with bias; from over-confidence to irrational optimism and future discounting. The good news is that understanding where people go wrong enables us to improve the decision-making process. Tali occupies a unique spot at the intersection of behavioural economics, neuroscience and psychology. From this rare seat she integrates up-to-date research in decision science and transforms this knowledge into practical insights. In this lively talk Tali helps the audience identify systematic decision-making errors and offers creative and practical methods for corrections and improvement.

WELLBEING: Using Science to Improve Mental-Health

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