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The Rules That Make Us

How Culture Shapes the Way We Act, Think, Believe and Buy

By: Oliver Sweet

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Hardcover | 26 February 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Format
Hardcover

Dimensions(cm)
16.2 x 24.2 x 3.2

Hardcover

RRP $55.00

$49.75

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'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.

Industry Reviews

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

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