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

by Dan Ariely

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.

What about longer time ?

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

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.

What this analysis tells me is that if you take people who love something (after all, the students who took part in this experiment signed up for an experiment to build Legos) and you place them in meaningful working conditions, the joy they derive from the activity is going to be a major driver in dictating their level of effort. However, if you take the same people with the same initial passion and desire and place them in meaningless working conditions, you can very easily kill any internal joy they might derive from the activity.

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.

THIS EXPERIMENT TAUGHT US that sucking the meaning out of work is surprisingly easy. If you’re a manager who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts. On the other hand, if you want to motivate people working with you and for you, it would be useful to pay attention to them, their effort, and the fruits of their labor.

How simple is it to ruin a job, how cheap is it to make it meaningful

There is one more way to think about the results of the finding pairs of letters experiment. The participants in the shredded condition quickly realized that they could cheat, because no one bothered to look at their work. In fact, if these participants were rational, upon realizing that their work was not checked, those in the shredded condition should have cheated, persisted in the task the longest, and made the most money. The fact that the acknowledged group worked longer and the shredded group worked the least further suggests that when it comes to labor, human motivation is complex. It can’t be reduced to a simple “work for money” trade-off. Instead we should realize that the effect of meaning on labor, as well as the effect of eliminating meaning from labor, are more powerful than we usually expect.

From this perspective, division 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. Highly divisible labor might be efficient if people were automatons, but, given the importance of internal motivation and meaning to our drive and productivity, this approach might backfire. In the absence of meaning, knowledge workers may feel like Charlie Chaplin’s character in Modern Times, pulled through the gears and cogs of a machine in a factory, and as a consequence they have little desire to put their heart and soul into their labor.

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.

As an old Arabic saying goes, “Even the monkey, in his mother’s eyes, is an antelope.”

These results imply that investing more effort does, indeed, increase our affection, but only when the effort leads to completion.

Our experiments demonstrated four principles of human endeavor: 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.

This principle is called an idiosyncratic fit. As an extreme example of this, imagine that a devoutly religious individual answered the question “How can individuals help to promote our ‘gross national happiness’?” by suggesting that everyone attend religious services daily. A steadfast atheist might respond to the same question by suggesting that everyone give up religion and focus instead on following the right kind of diet and exercise program. Each person may prefer his or her idea to ours—not because he or she came up with it but because it idiosyncratically fits with his or her underlying beliefs and preferences.

Even when we could not attribute the increase in perceived brilliance of the ideas to objective quality or to their idiosyncratic fit, the ownership component of the Not-Invented-Here bias was still going strong. At the end of the day, we concluded that once we feel that we have created something, we feel an increased sense of ownership—and we begin to overvalue the usefulness and the importance of “our” ideas.

In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the “toothbrush theory.” The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else’s.

The results were very clear. The men kept their hands in the tub much longer than the women. At the start of the next class I eagerly raised my hand and told Professor Weiner and the whole class about my results. Unfazed and without losing a beat, she told me that all I’d proven was that men were idiots. “Why would anybody,” she sneered, “keep their hand in hot water for your study? If there was a real goal to the pain, you would see what women are truly capable of.” I learned some important lessons that day about science, and also about women. I also learned that if someone believes something strongly, it is very difficult to convince him or her otherwise.*

In all of these cases, we expect that we will be miserable for a long time if things do not work out the way we hope; we also think that we will be enduringly happy if things go our way. But in general, our predictions are off base.*

Footnote book

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.

That might be the reason why lately people are talking about "investing" in experiences rather than things.

economist Tibor Scitovsky argued in The Joyless Economy, we have a tendency to take the safe and predictable path at work, and by extension in our personal life, and do the things that provide steady and reliable progress. But, Scitovsky argues, real progress—as well as real pleasure—comes from taking risks and trying very different things.

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.

This is basically the first set of experiments that I don't agree with. It sounds like really trying to confim a theory and is very biased. Some decisions are made to better suit suggested/tested solution, some stats are ignored. While I do agree that we can do better I think these studies were heavily biased. To the point that I would expect that you could easily, with minor changes (if any), present arranged marriages as the best and most effective solution.

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.

That's one of human's psychological flaws - it's quite easy to confuse in our brains the pleasure and excitement of an activity with interaction with the person. Similar how people are more likely to get together after extreme events, but also not for long. You can leverage that flaw by inviting someone you want into a rollercoaster ride or a parachute jump instead of going to see a movie or a play that could objectively (at least compared to those extreme activities) show who the other person really is, what they think etc.

If you were anything like the participants in the experiment, you would have given twice as much to Rokia as you would to fight hunger in general (in the statistical condition, the average donation was 23 percent of participants’ earnings; in the identifiable condition, the average was more than double that amount, 48 percent). This is the essence of what social scientists call “the identifiable victim effect”: once we have a face, a picture, and details about a person, we feel for them, and our actions—and money—follow. However, when the information is not individualized, we simply don’t feel as much empathy and, as a consequence, fail to act.

Those who were first angered in response to poor Kevin Kline’s treatment rejected the offers more frequently, and they kept making the same DECISIONS even when their angry emotions were no longer there. Similarly, those who were amused by the silly situation in the Friends clip accepted the offers more frequently while feeling the positive emotions, and they kept making the same DECISIONS even when the positive emotions dissipated. Clearly, our respondents were calling on their memories of playing the game earlier that day (when they were responding in part to their irrelevant emotions) and made the same DECISION, even though they were long removed from the original emotional state.

Is it more about making a connection with that particar game or something broader? Would a different game be the same as long as it was unfair?

This means that when we face new situations and are about to make decisions that can later be used for self-herding, we should be very careful to make the best possible choices. Our immediate decisions don’t just affect what’s happening at the moment; they can also affect a long sequence of related decisions far into our future.

Thanks to such experiments, we now know that some children’s cough medicines carry more risks than benefits, that surgeries for lower back pain are largely useless, that heart angioplasties and stents don’t really prolong the lives of patients, and that statins, while indeed reducing cholesterol, don’t effectively prevent heart diseases. And we are becoming aware of many more examples of treatments that don’t work as well as originally hoped.

But I’m surprised that the importance of experiments isn’t recognized more broadly, especially when it comes to important decisions in business or public policy. Frankly, I am often amazed by the audacity of the assumptions that businesspeople and politicians make, coupled with their seemingly unlimited conviction that their intuition is correct.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

Finally, a general sentiment of appreciation to my lovely wife, Sumi. I used to think that I was very easy to live with, but with every passing year I realize more and more how difficult it must be to live with me and, in contrast, how wonderful it is to live with you. Sumi, I will change the broken lightbulbs tonight when I get home. Actually, I will probably be late, so I will do it tomorrow. Well, you know what? I will definitely do it this weekend. I promise. Loving, Dan

Best thank you notes ever

Speaking of interruptions, think about television. We spend all kinds of money on gadgets and services such as TiVo to keep commercials out of our lives. But could we possibly enjoy the latest installment of Lost or House even more with the periodic interruptions of commercials? Leif, Tom, and Jeff Galak had the gall to test this. They discovered that when people are watching uninterrupted TV programs, their pleasure diminishes as the show goes on. But when the show is interrupted by commercial breaks, the pleasure level increases.

How should streaming platforms deal with that? Should the showmakers take that into account and introduce some artificial breaks in the plot in the middle of the show?

In experiments I conducted many years later with athletes, I found that counting helps increase endurance and that counting backward is even more helpful.

In context of handling pain

For two great books on medical delusions, see Nortin Hadler’s Stabbed in the Back and Worried Sick.

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