Enjoyable emotions such as gratitude, pride, inspiration, or nostalgia can motivate people to behave in positive ways triggering positive appraisals of events or situations. These appraisals might translate into positive behaviors, such as cooperation, adaptiveness, or even persistence toward a goal. This article discusses the benefits of enjoyable emotions and how their power can be leveraged to promote behavior change.
Governments around the world proclaim their interest in evidence-based policymaking. However, before evidence can affect policies, it needs to be used by human decision-makers. New research shows that politicians, like their voters, are subject to psychological biases, leading them to misinterpret policy information if it challenges their existing attitudes and beliefs. Moreover, they are more resistant to efforts to reduce those biases, and more likely to double down on their political beliefs even when at odds with the evidence at hand.
An increasing number of academic studies have used sports data to investigate economic behavior. Sports data are not only readily available, they also provide an excellent laboratory to study human behavior in real competitive environments. In this article, I will present several examples of my own work that have used sports data to explain fundamental economic theories, as well as articles that showed divergences of economic decision making from neo-classical theories.
Most people are overconfident in various aspect of their daily life. Yet, this bias has been shown to have detrimental economic and financial consequences. In light of these costs, why is this bias so persistent in the population? Our research provides an explanation for this phenomenon: being overconfident can provide a strategic advantage by influencing others in social interactions.
Using cognitive mechanisms (commitment, loss aversion, social norms and suchlike), I hacked myself to boost my motivation for exercise and healthy habits, get in shape and lose 15 kilos (33 pounds)… all in a record six months.
People use awards to incentivize positive behaviors all the time. Our research shows that, in some contexts, awards do not work and can even demotivate the target behavior. We find that awards might send unintended signals to recipients about the social norms and institutional expectations for the target behavior. Organizations and leaders considering using awards should know that awards can have more complicated consequences that might be intuitively expected.
Human behavior is remarkably complicated. And yet, just as Newton's laws of motion distill three fundamental truths about the physical world, the three laws of human behavior describe three fundamental truths of human behavior: People tend to stick to the status quo unless the forces of friction or fuel push us them off their path; behavior is a function of the person and their environment; every decision includes tradeoffs and the potential for unintended consequences.
Researchers have long maintained the importance of individual differences in motivational orientations for understanding personality and behavior. Recent findings suggest that strengthening and integrating four different motives in particular may make us better decision makers and more effective at achieving our goals.
