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

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СКАЧАТЬ the influential psychologist B. F. Skinner, this box is a regular cage (similar to the one you are used to), but it has two features that are new to you. The first is an automated food dispenser that releases food pellets every thirty seconds. Yum! The second is a bar that for some reason is covered with a tin shield.

      At first, the bar isn’t very interesting, but the food dispenser is, and that is where you spend your time. The food dispenser releases food pellets every so often for twenty-five minutes, until you have eaten fifty food pellets. At that point you are taken back to your cage and given the rest of your food for the day.

      The next day, your lunch hour passes by again without food, and at 1:00 P.M. you are placed back into the Skinner box. You’re ravenous but unhappy because this time the food dispenser doesn’t release any pellets. What to do? You wander around the cage, and, passing the bar, you realize that the tin shield is missing. You accidentally press the bar, and immediately a pellet of food is released. Wonderful! You press the bar again. Oh joy!—another pellet comes out. You press again and again, eating happily, but then the light goes off, and at the same time, the bar stops releasing food pellets. You soon learn that when the light is off, no matter how much you press the bar, you don’t get any food.

      Just then the man in the lab coat opens the top of the cage and places a tin cup in a corner of the cage. (You don’t know it, but the cup is full of pellets.) You don’t pay attention to the cup; you just want the bar to start producing food again. You press and press, but nothing happens. As long as the light is off, pressing the bar does you no good. You wander around the cage, cursing under your rat breath, and go over to the tin cup. “Oh my!” you say to yourself. “It’s full of pellets! Free food!” You begin chomping away, and then suddenly the light comes on again. Now 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. In fact, among all the animals tested so far the only species that prefers the lazy route is—you guessed it—the commendably rational cat.

      This brings us back to Jean Paul. If she were an economically rational bird and interested only in expending as little effort as possible to get her food, she would simply have eaten from the tray in her cage and ignored the SeekaTreat. Instead, she played with her SeekaTreat (and other toys) for hours because it provided her with a more meaningful way to earn her food and spend her time. She was not merely existing but mastering something and, in a sense, “earning” her living.^•

      THE GENERAL IDEA of contrafreeloading contradicts the simple economic view that organisms will always choose to maximize their reward while minimizing their effort. According to this standard economic view, spending anything, including energy, is considered a cost, and it makes no sense that an organism would voluntarily do so. Why work when they can get the same food—maybe even more food—for free?

      When I described contrafreeloading to one of my rational economist friends (yes, I still have some of these), he immediately explained to me how Jensen’s results do not, in fact, contradict standard economic reasoning. He patiently told me why this research was irrelevant to questions of economics. “You see,” he said, as one would to a child, “economic theory is about the behavior of people, not rats or parrots. Rats have very small brains and almost nonexistent neocortices,^* so it is no wonder that these animals don’t realize that they can get food for free. They are just confused.”

      “Anyway,” he continued, “I am sure that if you were to repeat Jensen’s experiment with normal people, you would not find this contrafreeloading effect. And I am a hundred percent positive that if you had used economists as your participants, you would not see anyone working unnecessarily!”

      He had a valid point. And though I felt that it is possible to generalize about the way we relate to work from those animal studies, it was also clear to me that some experiments on adult human contrafreeloading were in the cards. (It was also clear that I should not do the experiment on economists.)

      What do you think? Do humans, in general, exhibit contrafreeloading, or are they more rational? What about you?

      “Small-M” Motivations

      After David left my office, I started thinking about his and Devra’s disappointments. The lack of an audience for their work had made a big difference in their motivation. What is it aside from a paycheck, I wondered, that confers meaning on work? Is it the small satisfaction of focused engagement? Is it that, like Jean Paul, we enjoy feeling challenged by whatever it is we’re doing and satisfactorily completing a task (which creates a small level of meaning with a small m)? Or maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we’ve produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there (we might call this Meaning with a large M)? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning (even small-m meaning) can be sufficient to drive our behavior. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self-image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.

      Consider the work of writing, for example. Once upon a time, I wrote academic papers with an eye on promotion. But I also hoped—and still hope—that they might actually influence something in the world. How hard would I work on an academic paper if I knew for sure that only a few people would ever read it? What if I knew for sure that no one would ever read my work? Would I still do it?

      I truly enjoy the research I do; I think it’s fun. I’m excited to tell you, dear reader, about how I have spent the last twenty years of my life. I’m almost sure my mother will read this book,^* and I’m hoping that at least a few others will as well. But what if I knew for sure that no one would ever read it? That Claire Wachtel, my editor at HarperCollins, would decide to put this book in a drawer, pay me for it, and never publish it? Would I still be sitting here late at night working on this chapter? No way. Much of what I do in life, including writing my blog posts, articles, and these pages, is driven by ego motivations that link my effort to the meaning that I hope the readers of these words will find in them. Without an audience, I would have very little motivation to work as hard as I do.

      BLOGGING FOR TREATS

      Now think about blogging. The number of blogs out there is astounding, and it seems that almost everyone has a blog or is thinking about starting one. Why are blogs so popular? Not only is it because so many people have the desire to write; after all, people wrote before blogs were invented. It is also because blogs have two features that distinguish them from other forms of writing. First, they provide the hope or the illusion that someone else will read one’s writing. After СКАЧАТЬ