The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

“To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.”

“...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.”

“It is very difficult to make really big,important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptibleto a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of themthan we realize, and they come to visit us more often than welike to admit.”

“Upton Sinclair once noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)”

“...[T]he distance Boston drivers generally maintain from the car in front of them is visible only with a good microscope.”

“I do believe that an improved understanding of the multiple irrational forces that influence us could be a useful first step toward making better decisions.”

“The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. Greater labor leads to greater love. Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it.”

“Man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything. —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY”

“there is a great deal to be learned from rational economics, but some of its assumptions—that people always make the best decisions, that mistakes are less likely when the decisions involve a lot of money, and that the market is self-correcting—can clearly lead to disastrous consequences.”

“ON AN INTUITIVE level, most of us understand the deep interconnection between identity and labor. Children think of their potential future occupations in terms of what they will be (firemen, teachers, doctors, behavioral economists, or what have you), not about the amount of money they will earn.”

“Most blogs have very low readership—perhaps only the blogger’s mother or best friend reads them—but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions of people to blog.”

“One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne”

“We are more than height, weight, religion, and income. Others judge us on the basis of general subjective and aesthetic attributes, such as our manner of speaking and our sense of humor. We are also a scent, a sparkle of the eye, a sweep of the hand, the sound of a laugh, and the knit of a brow—ineffable qualities that can’t easily be captured in a database.”

“If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning—not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged. At the end of the day, such factors can exert a huge influence on satisfaction and productivity.”

“Jensen discovered (and many subsequent experiments confirmed) that many animals—including fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees—tend to prefer a longer, more indirect route to food than a shorter, more direct one.* That is, as long as fish, birds, gerbils, rats, mice, monkeys, and chimpanzees don’t have to work too hard, they frequently prefer to earn their food. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.”

“Company, Jeffrey Katzenberg not only won $280 million in compensation; he cofounded Dream-Works SKG, a Disney competitor that went on to release the highly successful movie Shrek. Not only did the movie make fun of Disney’s fairy tales, but its villain is also apparently a parody of the head of Disney at the time (and Katzenberg’s former boss), Michael Eisner. Now that you know Shrek’s background, I recommend you revisit the movie to see just how”

“the time, a psychologist and marketing expert by the name of Ernest Dichter speculated that leaving out some of the ingredients and allowing women to add them to the mix might resolve the issue.• This idea became known as the “egg theory.” Sure enough, once Pillsbury left out the dried eggs and required women to add fresh ones,”

“Sisyphean” as a tribute to the mythical king Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods for his avarice and trickery. Besides murdering travelers and guests, seducing his niece, and usurping his brother’s throne, Sisyphus also tricked the gods. Before he died, Sisyphus, knowing that he was headed to the Underworld, made his wife promise to refrain from offering the expected sacrifice following his death. Once he reached Hades, Sisyphus convinced kindhearted Persephone, the queen of the Underworld, to let him return to the upper world, so that he could ask his wife why she was neglecting her duty. Of course, Persephone had no idea that Sisyphus had intentionally asked his wife not to make the sacrifice, so she agreed, and Sisyphus escaped the Underworld, refusing to return. Eventually Sisyphus was captured and carried back, and the angry gods gave him his punishment: for the rest of eternity, he was forced to push a large rock up a steep hill, in itself a miserable task. Every time he neared the top of the hill, the rock would roll backward and he would have to start over. Of course, our participants had done nothing”

“An NBA clutch player can either improve his percentage success (which would indicate a sharpening of performance) or shoot more often with the same percentage (which suggests no improvement in skill but rather a change in the number of attempts). So we looked separately at whether the clutch players actually shot better or just more often. As it turned out, the clutch players did not improve their skill; they just tried many more times. Their field goal percentage did not increase in the last five minutes (meaning that their shots were no more accurate); neither was it the case that nonclutch players got worse. At this point you probably think that clutch players are guarded more heavily during the end of the game and this is why they don’t show the expected increase in performance. To see if this were indeed the case, we counted how many times they were fouled and also looked at their free throws. We found the same pattern: the heavily guarded clutch players were fouled more and got to shoot from the free-throw line more frequently, but their scoring percentage was unchanged. Certainly, clutch players are very good players, but our analysis showed that, contrary to common belief, their performance doesn’t improve in the last, most important part of the game.”

“Leif and Tom found that, in general, when asked about their preferences for breaking up experiences, people want to disrupt annoying experiences but prefer to enjoy pleasurable experiences without any breaks. But following the basic principles of adaptation, Leif and Tom suspected that people’s intuitions are completely wrong. People will suffer less when they do not disrupt annoying experiences, and enjoy pleasurable experiences more when they break them up.”

“I am not sure who started this chicken-and-egg problem, but as we consumers encounter offensive service, we become angrier and tend to take it out on the next service provider—whether or not he or she is responsible for our bad experience. The people receiving our emotional outbursts then go on to serve other customers, but because they are in a worse mood themselves, they aren’t in a position to be courteous and polite. And so goes the carousel of annoyance, frustration, and revenge in an ever-escalating cycle.”

“the translation of joy into willingness to work seems to depend to a large degree on how much meaning we can attribute to our own labor.”

“we don’t assume that people are perfectly sensible, calculating machines. Instead, we observe how people actually behave, and quite often our observations lead us to the conclusion that human beings are irrational.”

“Did the people in the difficult condition, who, by definition, had to work harder, value their unfortunate creations more than those who more easily and successfully turned out decent-looking cranes and frogs? And how did those who struggled with the difficult set of instructions but managed to complete the task compare with those who worked hard at it but didn’t succeed? We found that those who successfully completed their origami in the difficult condition valued their work the most, much more than those in the easy condition. In contrast, those in the difficult condition who did not manage to finish their work valued their results the least, much less than those in the easy condition. These results imply that investing more effort does,”

“THE GENERAL IDEA of contrafreeloading contradicts the simple economic view that organisms will always choose to maximize their reward while minimizing their effort.”

“Ám az a helyzet, hogy bár kiválóan el tudjuk képzelni a jövőt, azt nem láthatjuk előre, miként alkalmazkodunk majd hozzá.”

“Az egyik ilyen látogatás alkalmával megemlítettem Hanannak, hogy nemrégiben fogorvosnál jártam, és nem kértem sem lidokaint, sem bármilyen más érzéstelenítést a fúráshoz. „Érdekes élmény volt – meséltem. – Egyértelműen fájdalmas, és éreztem, amikor a fúró elérte az ideget, de nem zavart különösebben.”Hanan meglepődött, és elmesélte, hogy a balesete óta ő sem kér érzéstelenítést a fogorvosnál. Ezt követően eltöprengtünk azon, hogy vajon csupán két furcsamód mazochista egyén vagyunk-e, vagy az a tény tette kevésbé ijesztővé a fogfúrás viszonylag jelentéktelen eseményét, hogy korábban mindketten hosszú ideig tartó fájdalmakat éltünk át. Ösztönösen, és talán egotista módon abban állapodtunk meg, hogy valószínűleg ez utóbbiról van szó.”

“and, much as in real dating, experience something together. If so inclined, she might even suggest that they try to play some online games together, explore magical kingdoms, slay dragons, and solve problems.”

“In the end, our research findings suggest that the online market for single people should be structured with an understanding of what people can and can’t naturally do. It should use technology in ways that are congruent with what we are naturally good at and help us with the tasks that don’t fit with our innate abilities.”

“we can harness adaptation to maximize our overall satisfaction in life by shifting our investments away from products and services that give us a constant stream of experiences and toward ones that are more temporary and fleeting. For example, stereo equipment and furniture generally provide a constant experience, so it’s very easy to adapt to them. On the other hand, transient experiences (a four-day getaway, a scuba diving adventure, or a concert) are fleeting, so you can’t adapt to them as readily. I am not recommending that you sell your sofa and go scuba diving, but it is important to understand what types of experiences are more and less susceptible to adaptation.”