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.
I recently posted several humorous pictures illustrating the risks of assuming that correlation amounts to causation. But now comes along another interesting picture, that practically forces me to abandon scientific rigor and embrace the inevitable conclusion – that chocolate consumption leads to genius: Is everybody on board with my reasoning? (Click here to view comments)
I’ve done a fair amount of research on how people emotionally adapt to life circumstances. My research is mainly in the context of illness and disability, where people bounce back from adversity more than expected. But people can also emotionally adapt to good things, a very important phenomenon for consumer behavior. We are ecstatic when…
“When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it. It’s hard to know which is worse.” – Michael Foster Green, Professor, UCLA Department of Psychiatry (Click here to view comments)
In a wonderful New Yorker article titled “The Hangover,” Nick Paumgarten writes about the strange mix of private and government forces that led to the Spanish fiscal crisis. In a wonderful sentence, he evokes one such force, the almost invisibility of debt: It is often hard to perceive an economic crisis. Debt doesn’t look like…
During a break between classes, I offered some MBA students the chance to make a little extra money. Some would have a job of sitting in the classroom for five minutes doing nothing, absolutely nothing – no reading, no listening to music; just staring straight ahead. For this effortless job, they would receive $2.50. Others…
In a recent post, I wrote about the fact that many physicians in the US do not accept new appointments with Medicaid enrollees. I was surprised to see it quickly garnered over 25,000 views. I guess it’s good to write posts that people read. But I fear that many people read it because it was…