Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.
Linking financial element to energy consumption I think has a huge role if you think about a display instrument that could teach us about what we are using, how much it costs us, how much it is saving, and therefore change our decisions.
But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .
We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.
The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.
When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it – meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride.
The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you’re actually more and more likely to fail.
The major thing that holds you back when you’re trying to change a bad habit like eating, smoking, or drinking too much is your belief you are out of control.
People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.
Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.
The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn’t mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.
People are irrational – and predictably so.
Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, ‘No, this not real cheating.’ So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that’s what we find, is that we’re basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.
Marketing is all about providing information that will heighten someone’s anticipated and real pleasure.
Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you’re not prepared for that, it’s going to be really terrible.
In terms of the actual curriculum for management education, my own view is very simple-minded: The world is incredibly complex, it changes all the time, and we should not even hope that we could create a general model that accurately describes the world in all its possible states.
The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.
What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you’re creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.
What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, “OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement.”
I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?