One percent of people will always be honest and never steal,” the locksmith said. “Another one percent will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television. And the rest...

It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating – on our...

It seems then that instead of consumers’ willingness to pay influencing market prices, the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers’ willingness to pay.

…[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one...

The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you’re actually more and more likely to fail.

When the Starbursts cost a cent apiece, the average number of candies per customer was 3.5, but when the price went down to zero, the average went down to 1.1 per customer. The students limited...

In essence, individuals more concerned with portraying their own uniqueness were more likely to select an alcoholic beverage not yet ordered at their table in an effort to demonstrate that they were in fact one...

Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don’t want to be honest all the time.

Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come...

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...

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...

While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.

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.

It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather...

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can...

We talk about honesty, but the reality is we have lots of human values, and they are not all compatible. We don’t always tell the truth about everything, no matter what the consequences.

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...

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...

In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even...

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea — whether it’s about politics or sports — what do we do? We...

The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.

Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we’ve done so far, what mistakes we’ve made, and what improvements should come next.

Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren’t doing so well in class are at even higher risk – students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students. In...

We all think that in the future, we are wonderful people. We will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will exercise, we will eat well… The problem is we never get to live in...

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.

A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its “resting state” in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over...

When people think about a placebo such as the royal touch, they usually dismiss it as “just psychology.” But, there is nothing “just” about the power of a placebo, and in reality it represents the...

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne