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

by Dan Ariely

(As 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.”)

Obviously, NBA players are not bankers. The NBA is much more selective than the financial industry; very few people are sufficiently skilled to play professional basketball, while many, many people work as professional bankers. As we’ve seen, it’s also easier to get positive returns from high incentives when we’re talking about physical rather than cognitive skills. NBA players use both, but playing basketball is more of a physical than a mental activity (at least relative to banking). So it would be far more challenging for the bankers to demonstrate “clutch” abilities when the task is less physical and demands more gray matter. Also, since the basketball players don’t actually improve under pressure, it’s even more unlikely that bankers would be able to perform to a higher degree when they are under the gun.

As it turns out, overmotivation to perform well can stem from electrical shocks, from high payments, or from social pressures, and in all these cases humans and nonhumans alike seem to perform worse when it is in their best interest to truly outdo themselves.

How much more effective might your doctors be in what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called a “state of flow”—when they are fully engaged and focused on the task at hand and oblivious to anything else?

“Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.

though we can recognize the effect of even small-m meaning on motivation, we dramatically underestimate its power.

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.

My own suspicion is that the drive toward goal establishment and goal completion is “hard wired.” Humans, like most animals and even plants, are maintained by complex arrays of homeostatic mechanisms that keep the body’s systems in equilibrium. Many of the miseries of mountaineering, such as hunger, thirst and pain, are manifestations of homeostatic mechanisms that motivate people to do what they need to survive . . . the visceral need for goal completion, then, may be simply another manifestation of the organism’s tendency to deal with problems—in this case the problem of executing motivated actions.

This idea became known as the “egg theory.” Sure enough, once Pillsbury left out the dried eggs and required women to add fresh ones, along with milk and oil, to the mix, sales took off.

The reason we used this procedure was to ensure that it was in the participant’s best interest to bid the highest amount that they were willing to pay for their origami—not a penny more or less.*

first-price and second-price auctions.

The lack of difference between the two bidding approaches suggested not only that we overvalue our own creations but also that we are largely unaware of this tendency; we mistakenly think that others love our work as much as we do.