How Goes the Behavior-Change Revolution?

How Goes the Behavior-Change Revolution? (Ep. 382) - Freakonomics Freakonomics

"NORTON: There’s complaintbragging and then there’s humblebragging. So complaintbragging, whenever someone online says, “Ugh,” right after that it’s going to be a complaintbrag. Just wait for it. It’s always a complaintbrag. So they say, “Ugh, wearing sweatpants and everyone’s still hitting on me.” One of my favorite ones ever was, “My hand is so sore from signing so many autographs.”So humblebragging, usually people recycle from Wayne’s World for some reason, “Not worthy.” So that’s — and whenever you see that, that means that here comes a humblebrag. “Not worthy,” and then say, “So honored to be onstage with Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth.” So what I’m really just doing is saying, “I’m onstage with really important people, but I’m acting all humble about it.”The reason that people do these things, we can show in the research, is they’re feeling insecure. So I want to brag, always, because I want everyone to think I’m awesome. But I have the theory that if I brag, people won’t like me, because nobody likes a braggart. So we think what we can do is if we’re humble about it, then people will say, “Oh, what a nice guy. And also I learned that he knows celebrities.” And instead what people think is, “What a jerk.” So in fact we like braggarts, just straight-up braggarts, which is just saying, “I met a famous person.” We like them more than people who do this little strategy where they try to humblebrag...

Justin SYDNOR: Many of us now have choices to make about health insurance plans... most of the plans were a deal that no economist should take. So most of the plans were such that you were going to pay more for sure for the year if you chose that plan. Doesn’t matter if you turn out to be healthy or unhealthy. You’re going to pay more... what we found very quickly there is you get exactly the same patterns if you just give people four plans or two plans. So it’s really not about choice overload. It’s fundamentally that when people look at insurance, they can’t combine the premium and these out-of-pocket costs and make what looks like the rational math calculation... we’ve run some little experiments, and it looks like if you make it easier to compare the plans, you can really easily inform and improve these options.But maybe the bigger implication is that we should just stop giving people choices about this. And the reason we should stop giving people choices about this is that the only really good reason to give people choices is that we think that they might want to sort into plans that are good for them, and have some bearing on their risk aversion...

GILOVICH: You regret action more than inaction sometimes. But if you ask people what are your biggest regrets in life, they tend to report regrets of inaction. How do you reconcile those two? And the reconciliation is that you feel more immediate pain over the regret of action but, partly because it’s so painful, you do things about it. You think of it differently, and you’ve taken an action and one of the ways that you can come to grips with it is to say, “Well, it was a mistake, but I learned so much.” It’s hard to learn so much by not doing something new... a very frequent regret is one of not doing something because of a fear of social consequences. “What will people think?”... As David Foster Wallace put it, “You won’t mind so much, how people judge you when you recognize how little they do.”...

THALER: In England there’s a tradition, a hallowed tradition, of buying rounds. The way it’s done at the pub is you go with your mates and I would buy the first round and you would buy the second round and until we each bought a round.Now this has obvious problems if the number of people in the group is more than, say, three. What I suggested was that pubs institute a new policy, which is, for groups of more than three, they run a tab.Well, this was supposed to be a private meeting, but it leaked to the press and I got hate mail."


Libertarianism relies on humans being homo economicus - which is why it fails