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The Rules That Make Us: How Culture Shapes the Way We Act, Think, Believe and Buy

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What to expect

'A clear, compassionate, and much-needed book for our time' - Christian Madsbjerg, author of Look and Sensemaking

Oliver Sweet is one of the world's leading business anthropologists. He works with brands like Coke, Ikea, Google and Dyson, as well as local councils and national governments, to reveal the secrets behind our decision making.

Why do we do what we do? We might think it's our unique personality and individual differences that guide our choices, but more often than not, it's actually culture shaping our behaviour. From the ways we bring up children to the products we buy, the culture we live in creates who we are.

In The Rules That Make Us, business anthropologist Oliver Sweet reveals the secrets to successful people-watching and how we can better understand consumers, voters and our relationships. His decades-long, trailblazing work uses cultural insights to help businesses, governments and NGOs achieve their goals - whether he's working with the Gates Foundation to encourage South African men to get HIV tests, helping a pet food company break into a new market in Brazil, or researching why 'nudge' techniques often backfire.

Drawing on research conducted in thirty-five countries, Sweet maps culture's hidden rules: how they govern our behaviour, create our assumptions, even how they help us predict the future. The Rules that Make Us gives us a model for thinking about culture that reveals a new way of understanding our families, colleagues, customers and ourselves.

Critics Review

A clear, compassionate, and much-needed book for our time. In an age obsessed with data and individual psychology, it reminds us that human behaviour is never just about the person - it's about the patterns, rituals, and unspoken rules of culture that make us who we are. With the eye of an anthropologist and the clarity of a storyteller, Oliver Sweet helps us see the water we all swim in - the invisible systems that shape our choices, our communities, and even our sense of self. This book doesn't just explain culture; it restores our ability to see it - to notice what we have stopped noticing. It's an elegant argument for why understanding people requires understanding the world they inhabit. I read it with gratitude and a sense of recognition: this is how deep seeing begins.
Christian Madsbjerg, author of LOOK and SENSEMAKING
Oliver Sweet does something rare: he captures cultural complexity without flattening it into easy answers. The evidence is rigorous, the thinking is nuanced, and the whole thing feels genuinely contemporary. People will still be referencing this in a decade ... and more!
Rob Scotland, head of brand marketing at Veo
From national culture to organizational culture, our lives are shaped by hidden rules that govern how we behave and what we believe. In this engaging new book, Oliver Sweet uncovers these rules and helps us understand how to recognize their influence. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the world really works.
Erin Meyer, author of The Culture Map
The Rules That Make Us is anthropology in technicolour - accessible, sharp and unsettling in all the right ways. It reminds us that culture doesn't just describe who we are; it scripts what we believe is possible.
Dr Lollie Mancey, Keynote Speaker, Programme Director at UCD Innovation Academy
This book is the perfect complement - or maybe antidote? - to psychology-based ways of imagining human behaviour, as a matter of individual choices. People don't just behave, Sweet shows, they act. And action is not an individual activity, but a social one. To understand people is to understand what they do with and through the collective structures and dynamics that underpin their lives ... Policy makers, think tankers, businesses, consultants, listen up: forget 'nudge' and 'behaviour change' - culture is where it's at!
Professor Martin Holbraad, Director of the Ethnographic Insights Lab, UCL Anthropology
We live in an age where AI can give us an answer in seconds. But Oliver Sweet reminds us that answers are not the same as understanding. The Rules That Make Us is a challenge to the lazy comfort of assumptions: real insights demand the types of approaches and thinking he describes here: presence, patience, and the humility to ask 'why' without importing our own baggage. If you think you already know, this book will make you think again.
Ben Page, Visiting Professor, Kings College London
Oliver Sweet's book is not only a highly informative read and riotously entertaining, but it's an important book. Stories of origin, culture and belonging are being twisted by lots of people: of people with bad, silly or ill-informed intentions ... The Rules That Make Us takes a sledgehammer to this and gives us a brilliant and truthful account of how culture shapes us, but more importantly how it unites us more than divides us. Read it and enjoy it and then give it to a teenager in your life who is consuming a lot of nonsense about culture and stories of origin - absolutely brilliant!
Chloe Combi, author, speaker, columnist, consultant
I've known Oli for many years, both as a fellow culture geek and as an ethnographer whose insights have helped shape global brand strategy at Coca-Cola. I've seen his thinking in action - how his anthropological approach reveals what truly drives people and communities. The Rules That Make Us is more than a guide to culture; it's a framework for seeing the systems that shape belief, behaviour, and belonging. What makes it powerful is that it's not just theory - it's lived anthropology, translated into a way of thinking that anyone can use. This book doesn't just describe the world; it helps you understand how to work with it.
Murray Stanford, Head of Anthropology, Coca-Cola

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