The Upside of Irrationality – Fitness Scholar

When the shocks were of medium intensity, the rats were more motivated than the low intensity group to learn faster… when the shock intensity was very high, the rats performed worse… the rats could not focus on anything other than the fear of shock (1) – page 20
We found that those who could earn a small bonus (equivalent to one day of pay) and the medium-level bonus (equivalent to two weeks’ worth of work) did not differ much from each other. We concluded that since even our small payment was worth a substantial amount to our participants, it probably already maximized their motivation. But how did they perform when the very large bonus (the amount equivalent to five months of their regular pay rate) was on the line? As you can tell from the figure above, the data from our experiment showed that people, at least in this regard, are very much like rats. Those who stood to earn the most demonstrated the lowest level of performance (2) – page 19
When the job at hand involved only clicking two keys on a keyboard, higher bonuses led to higher performance. However, once the task required even some rudimentary cognitive skills (in the form of simple math problems), the higher incentives led to a negative effect on performance, just as we had seen in the experiment in India. The conclusion was clear: paying people high bonuses can result in high performance when it comes to simple mechanical tasks, but the opposite can happen when you ask them to use their brains —which is usually what companies try to do when they pay executives very high bonuses (2) – page 22
Without knowing our results, our “postdictors” (that is, predictors after the fact) expected that the level of performance would increase with the level of payment—mispredicting the effects of the very high bonuses on performance. These results suggested that the negative effect of high bonuses is not something that people naturally intuit. (2) – page 22
In eight of the thirteen trials, participants solved their anagrams working alone in private cubicles. In the other five trials, they were instructed to stand up, walk to the front of the room, and try to solve the anagrams on a large blackboard in plain view of the other participants. In these public trials, performing well on the anagrams was more important, since the participants would not only receive the payment for their performance (as in the private trials) but would also stand to reap some social rewards in the form of the admiration of their peers (or be humiliated if they failed in front of everyone). Would they solve more anagrams in public—when their performance mattered more—or in private, when there was no social motivation to do well? As you’ve probably guessed, the participants solved about twice as many anagrams in private as in public (2) – page 26
you realize that you have two possible food sources. You can keep on eating the free food from the tin cup, or you can go back to the bar and press it for food pellets. If you were this rat, what would you do? Assuming you were like all but one of the two hundred rats in Jensen’s study, you would decide not to feast entirely from the tin cup. Sooner or later, you would return to the bar and press it for food. And if you were like 44 percent of the rats, you would press the bar quite often—enough to feed you more than half your pellets. What’s more, once you started pressing the bar, you would not return so easily to the cup with the abundant free food. 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 (3) – page 35
Joe and the other participants in the meaningful condition built an average of 10.6 Bionicles and received an average of $14.40 for their time. Even after they reached the point where their earnings for each Bionicle were less than a dollar (half of the initial payment), 65 percent of those in the meaningful condition kept on working. In contrast, those in the Sisyphean condition stopped working much sooner. On average, that group built 7.2 Bionicles (68 percent of the number built by the participants in the meaningful condition) and earned an average of $11.52. Only 20 percent of the participants in the Sisyphean condition constructed Bionicles when the payment was less than a dollar per robot… 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 (4) – page 39
They thought that those in the meaningful condition would make one or two more Bionicles, but, in fact, they made an average of 3.5 more. This result suggests that though we can recognize the effect of even small-m meaning on motivation, we dramatically underestimate its power. (4) – page 40
Once they finished a page, they handed it to the experimenter, who looked over the sheet from top to bottom, nodded in a positive way, and placed it upside down on top of a large pile of completed sheets. The instructions for the ignored condition were basically the same, but we didn’t ask participants to write their names at the top of the sheet. After completing the task, they handed the sheet to the experimenter, who placed it on top of a high stack of papers without even a sidelong glance. In the third, ominously named shredded condition, we did something even more extreme. Once the participant handed in their sheet, instead of adding it to a stack of papers, the experimenter immediately fed the paper into a shredder, right before the participant’s eyes, without even looking at it… half (49 percent) of those in the acknowledged condition went on to complete ten sheets or more, whereas only 17 percent in the shredded condition completed ten sheets or more… participants in the acknowledged condition completed on average 9.03 sheets of letters; those in the shredded condition completed 6.34 sheets; and those in the ignored condition (drumroll, please) completed 6.77 sheets (and only 18 percent of them completed ten sheets or more). The amount of work produced in the ignored condition was much, much closer to the performance in the shredded condition than to that in the acknowledged condition. (4) – page 42
the creators had a substantial bias when evaluating their own work. Noncreators viewed the amateurish art as useless and the professional versions as much, much more exciting. In contrast, the creators saw their own work as almost as good as the experts’ origami. It seemed that the difference between creators and noncreators was not in how they viewed the art of origami in general but in the way that the creators came to love and overvalue their own creations (5) – page 51
creators bid the same amount when they considered only their own evaluation for the product (second-price auction) as when they also considered what noncreators would bid for it (first-price auction). 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 (5) – page 52
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, indeed, increase our affection, but only when the effort leads to completion. When the effort is unfruitful, affection for one’s work plummets (5) – page 56
For example, when researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore11 showed participants videos of doctors responding to medical errors, participants rated the doctors who expressed an apology and who took personal responsibility far more favorably. What’s more, another research team from the University of Massachusetts Medical School found that people expressed less interest in suing doctors who had assumed responsibility, apologized, and planned a means of avoiding the error in the future (6) – page 80
The participants who had been mildly injured reported that the hot water became painful (pain threshold) after about 4.5 seconds, while those who had been severely injured started feeling pain after 10 seconds. More interestingly, those in the mildly injured group removed their hands from the hot water (pain tolerance) after about 27 seconds, while the severely injured individuals kept their hands in the hot water for about 58 seconds (7) – page 87
he observed that only three-quarters of the hurt soldiers requested pain medication, despite having suffered serious injuries ranging from penetrating wounds to extensive soft tissue wounds. Beecher compared these observations to treatments of his civilian patients who had been hurt in all kinds of accidents, and he found that people with civilian injuries requested more medication than the soldiers injured in battle did (8) – page 88
It turned out that the breakups were not as earth-shattering as the students had expected and the emotional grieving was much shorter-lived than they had originally assumed (9) – page 90
almost everyone has a common sense of what is beautiful and what isn’t. We all find people like Halle Berry and Orlando Bloom “hot,” regardless of how we ourselves look; uneven features and buckteeth do not become the new standard of beauty for the aesthetically challenged… those who were more attractive cared more about attractiveness, while the less attractive people cared more about other characteristics (intelligence, sense of humor, and kindness). This finding was our first evidence that aesthetically challenged people reprioritize their requirements in dating. Next, we examined how each speed dater evaluated each of their partners during the event itself and how this evaluation translated to a desire to meet for a real date. Here, too, we saw the same pattern: the aesthetically challenged people were much more interested in going on another date with those they thought had a sense of humor or some other nonphysical characteristic, while the attractive people were much more likely to want to go on a date with someone they evaluated as good-looking. If we take the findings from the HOT or NOT, the Meet Me, and the speed-dating experiments, the data suggest that while our own level of attractiveness does not change our aesthetic tastes, it does have a large effect on our priorities. Simply put, less attractive people learn to view nonphysical attributes as more important (10) – page 107
men are less selective in dating than women. It turns out that this is not just a stereotype: men were 240 percent more likely to send Meet Me invitations to potential females than vice versa. The data also confirmed the casual observation that men care more about the hotness of women than the other way around (10) – page 108
We asked the coders to categorize each response: Was the attribute easily measurable and searchable by a computer algorithm (for example, height, weight, eye and hair color, education level, and so on)? Or was it experiential and harder to search for (say, a love of Monty Python skits or a passion for golden retrievers)? The results showed that our experienced online daters were about three times as interested in experiential than in searchable attributes, and this tendency was even stronger for people who said they sought long-term, rather than short-term, relationships. Combined, the results of our studies suggested that using searchable attributes for online dating is unnatural, even for people who have lots of practice with this type of activity (11) – page 114
We found that both men and women liked their speed-dating partner more if they’d first met during the virtual date. In fact, they were about twice as likely to be interested in a real date after the virtual date than after the regular online one (12) – page 117
It depicts the amount of money donated to help victims across a variety of catastrophes (Hurricane Katrina, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the tsunami in Asia, tuberculosis, AIDS, and malaria) and the number of people these tragedies affected directly. The graph clearly shows that in these cases, as the number of sufferers increased, the amount of money donated decreased. We can also see that more money went to U.S.-based tragedies (Hurricane Katrina and the terrorist attacks of 9/11) than to non-U.S. ones, such as the tsunami (13) – page 128
people who felt irritated by the Life as a House clip were much more likely to reject the unfair offers than those who watched Friends (14) – page 134
if you had watched the Friends clip, you accordingly accepted the uneven offer (again, misattributing your reaction to the offer and not to the clip). As a sender, you might now think, “I accepted a $7.50:$2.50 split because I felt okay about it. The person I am sending the offer to this time is probably like me, and he is likely to also accept such an offer, so let me give him the same $7.50:$2.50 split.” This would be an example of the general self-herding mechanism: remembering your actions, attributing them to a more general principle, and following the same path. You even assume that your counterpart would act in a similar way. The results of our experiments weighted in favor of the general version of self-herding. The initial emotions had an effect long after the fact, even when the role was reversed. Senders who first experienced the angry condition offered more even splits to recipients, while those who were in the happy condition extended more unfair offers.(14) – page 138

The relation of strength and stimulus to rapidity of habit formation
Large stakes and big mistakes
Preference for bar pressing over freeloading as afunction of number of unrewarded presses, Freeloading in the skinner box contrasted with freeloading in the runway
Man’s search for meaning: the case of legos
The ikea effect: when labor leads to love
Disclosing Medical Errors to Patients: It’s Not What You Say It’s What They Hear, Disclosure of Medical Errors: What Factors Influence How Patients Respond?
The effect of past-injury on pain threshold and tolerance
Pain in men wounded in battle
Mispredicting distress following romantc breakup revealing the itme course of hte affective forecasting error
If i’m not hot, are you hot or not? phsyical attractiveness evaluations and datin preferences as a function of one’s own attractiveness
People are experience goods: improving online dating with virtual dates
Chat circles
Mismatching Money and Need,” in Keith Epstein, “Crisis Mentality: Why Sudden Emergencies Attract More Funds than Do Chronic Conditions, and How Nonprofits Can Change That
The enduring impact of transient emotions on decision making