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

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СКАЧАТЬ Frankl described a related example of choking under social pressure. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote about a patient with a persistent stutter who, try as he might, could not rid himself of it. In fact, the only time the poor fellow had been free of his speech problem was once when he was twelve years old. In that instance, the conductor of a streetcar had caught the boy riding without a ticket. Hoping the conductor would pity him for his stutter and let him off, the boy tried to stutter—but since he did not have any incentive to speak without stuttering, he was unable to do it! In a related example, Frankl describes a patient with a fear of perspiring: “Whenever he expected an outbreak of perspiration, this anticipatory anxiety was enough to precipitate excessive sweating.” In other words, the patient’s high social motivation to be sweat-free ironically led to more perspiration or, in economic terms, to lower performance.

      In case you’re wondering, choking under social pressure is not limited to humans. A variety of our animal friends have been put to similar tests, including no one’s favorite—the cockroach—who starred in one particularly interesting study. In 1969, Robert Zajonc, Alexander Heingartner, and Edward Herman wanted to compare the speed at which roaches would accomplish different tasks under two conditions. In one, they were alone and without any company. In the other, they had an audience in the form of a fellow roach. In the “social” case, the other roach watched the runner through a Plexiglas window that allowed the two creatures to see and smell each other but that did not allow any direct contact.

      One task that the cockroaches performed was relatively easy: the roach had to run down a straight corridor. The other, more difficult task required the roach to navigate a somewhat complex maze. As you might expect (assuming you have expectations about roaches), the insects performed the simpler runway task much more quickly when another roach was observing them. The presence of another roach increased their motivation, and, as a consequence, they did better. However, in the more complex maze task, they struggled to navigate their way in the presence of an audience and did much worse than when they performed the same complex task alone. So much for the benefits of social pressure.

      I don’t suppose that the knowledge of shared performance anxiety will endear roaches to you, but it does demonstrate the general ways in which high motivation to perform well can backfire (and it may also point to some important similarities between humans and roaches). 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.

      Where Do We Go from Here?

      These findings make it clear that figuring out the optimal level of rewards and incentives is not easy. I do believe that the inverse-U relationship originally suggested by Yerkes and Dodson generally holds, but obviously there are additional forces that could make a difference in performance. These include the characteristics of the task (how easy or difficult it is), the characteristics of the individual (how easily they become stressed), and characteristics related to the individual’s experience with the task (how much practice a person has had with this task and how much effort they need to put into it). Either way, we know two things: it’s difficult to create the optimal incentive structure for people, and higher incentives don’t always lead to the highest performance.

      I want to be clear that these findings don’t mean that we should stop paying people for their work and contributions. But they do mean that the way we pay people can have powerful unintended consequences. When corporate HR departments design compensation plans, they usually have two goals: to attract the right people for the job and to motivate them to do the best they can. There is no question that these two objectives are important and that salaries (in addition to benefits, pride, and meaning—topics that we will cover in the next few chapters) can play an important role in fulfilling these goals. The problem is with the types of compensations people receive. Some, such as very high bonuses, can create stress because they cause people to overfocus on the compensation, while reducing their performance.

      TO TRY TO get a feeling for how a high salary might change your behavior and influence your performance, imagine the following thought experiment: What if I paid you a lot of money, say $100,000, to come up with a very creative idea for a research project in the next seventy-two hours? What would you do differently? You would probably substitute some of your regular activities with others. You would not bother with your e-mail; you wouldn’t check Facebook; you wouldn’t leaf through a magazine. You would probably drink a lot of coffee and sleep much less. Maybe you would stay at the office all night (as I do from time to time). This means that you would work more hours, but would doing any of this help you be more creative?

      Hours spent working aside, let’s consider how your thought process would change during those critical seventy-two hours. What would you do to make yourself more creative and productive? Would you close your eyes harder? Would you visualize a mountaintop? Bite your lips to a larger degree? Breathe deeply? Meditate? Would you be able to chase away random thoughts more easily? Would you type faster? Think more deeply? Would you do any of those things and would they really lead you to a higher level of performance?

      This is just a thought experiment, but I hope it illustrates the idea that though a large amount of money would most likely get you to work many hours (which is why high payment is very useful as an incentive when simple mechanical tasks are involved), it is unlikely to improve your creativity. It might, in fact, backfire, because financial incentives don’t operate in a simple way on the quality of output from our brains. Nor is it at all clear how much of our mental activity is really under our direct control, especially when we are under the gun and really want to do our best.

      

      NOW LET’S IMAGINE that you need a critical, lifesaving surgery. Do you think that offering your medical team a skyhigh bonus would really result in improved performance? Would you want your surgeon and anesthesiologist to think, during the operation, about how they might use the bonus to buy a sailboat? That would clearly motivate them to get the bonus, but would it get them to perform better? Wouldn’t you rather they devoted all of their mental energy to the task at hand? 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? I’m not sure about you, but for important tasks that require thinking, concentration, and cognitive skill, I would take a doctor who’s in a flow state any day.

      A Few Words about Small and Large Decisions

      For the most part, researchers like me carry out laboratory-based experiments. Most of these involve simple decisions, short periods of time, and relatively low stakes. Because traditional economists usually do not like the answers that our lab experiments produce, they often complain that our results do not apply to the real world. “Everything would change,” they say, “if the decisions were important, the stakes were higher, and people tried harder.” But to me, that’s like saying that people always get the best care in the emergency room because the decisions made there are often literally life and death. (I doubt many people would argue that this is the case.) Absent empirical evidence one way or the other, such criticism of laboratory experiments is perfectly reasonable. It is useful to have some healthy skepticism about any results, including those generated in relatively simple lab experiments. Nevertheless, it is not clear to me why the psychological mechanisms that underlie our simple decisions and behaviors would not be the same ones that underlie more complex and important ones.

      CARING AS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

      First Knight, a movie that came out in 1995 starring Sean Connery and Richard Gere, demonstrates one extreme way of dealing with the way motivation affects performance. Richard Gere’s character, Sir Lancelot, is a vagabond СКАЧАТЬ