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.
Heuristics is jargon used by decision psychologists and behavioral economists to refer to cognitive shortcuts we humans take to make judgments and decisions. One of the first heuristics identified as such by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky was the anchoring heuristic. I would define it for you, but it is wonderfully captured in this cartoon:
I have long been a fan of single sentence paragraphs. I really have. When used properly, an occasional one-off sentence can really stand out, amidst the tumble of longer paragraphs made up of complicated sentences. Here’s a good example from The Power Broker. In this part of the book, Robert Moses has spent an intense…
“There are higher things in this life than the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort. It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness. We ask for a great navy, partly because we feel that no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when…
For at least the last few decades, conservative legal scholarship in United States has paid a great deal of attention to the idea of original intent. According to this view, the best way to interpret the Constitution of the United States is to imagine what the writers of that document meant at the time they…
Whether you believe in God or not, belong to a specific faith or not, it is hard to deny the logic of the following statement: “All those religions. They can’t all be right. But they can all be wrong.” – Anonymous member of utopian Zoar community, on her deathbed. (Click here to view comments)
In collaboration with several co-authors, including Peggy Liu – a marketing PhD student here at Fuqua – I just published a paper on how behavioral economics can help us think about better ways to combat obesity. Feel free to check it out. And feel free to send along your thoughts, too. Using Behavioral Economics to…