Why People Agree to Work Boring Jobs
NPR recently covered my research with David Comerford on effort aversion. Our research gives some insight into how people wind up in boring jobs. You can listen to the NPR Morning Edition segment here.
WWII Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen on military strategy: “Tactics are nine tenths audacity.”
David Brooks is a pretty solidly moderate conservative, and one who is a big fan of behavioral science. But that doesn’t mean he can see beyond his own biases, especially when describing the differences between conservatives and liberals. He was particularly offensive on May 7, in an article titled “Beyond the Fence,” in which he discusses…
The surgeon told the Weindel family that the operation had gone well. He had taken Dale Weindel’s stomach and cut it into two, and rerouted his small intestines so that all the food Weindel ate would now pass through the smaller portion of his stomach. He had given Weindel a “gastric bypass” operation, the best…
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
The National Health Service in the United Kingdom has recently disseminated a wonderful graphic, helping people understand how likely they are to die from scary things, like war and airplane accidents, versus less terrifying but deadlier hazards, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol: In behavioral economics, we talk about something called the “availability…
It’s always tricky to judge anyone’s moral character, much less that of historical figures who lived during times very different from our own. Most of the great people who founded the United States, for example, had slaves. Some even sired children with those slaves – like Thomas Jefferson. Hard to know how to judge that….