YouSaid · the spoken record

Thomas D. Gilovich

lines on the record: 71
first: 2018-01-25
most recent: 2018-01-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“and behavioral economists have been using that a lot to exemplified best in the Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein book Nudge, figure out what's preventing this. Rearrange the environment a little bit that makes the behavior easier. You want more of this? Make it a little bit easier. And I think if... If I knew that sooner, I would be more effective in consulting on political campaigns or helping people in their personal lives as well.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. And a simple answer to it. I knew this a lot in psychology, but I kept it sort of walled off there and didn't appreciate its breadth, which is an idea often attributed to Kurt Lewin, which is when we're trying to change behavior, other peoples are our own. We often try to do it by increasing motivation, psych people up, hire motivational speakers to get the sales force charged up and so on. And there are times in which that is helpful when motivation's the problem, getting more motivation is great. But oftentimes, that's not the problem. People are perfectly well motivated and they just can't figure out how to translate their strong motivations into effective action. And Lewin's idea, very simple one, is when that's the case, don't try to push people more, figure out what's preventing them, and take away those blockages.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff, you never know what you're going to draw upon in your life. So take the kinds of courses, do the kinds of things that you're really engaged in. Push yourself a little bit. That's what I would say. You know, the world changes so quickly you can't anticipate what the skills of the marketplace are going to be with that much accuracy. So just keep building your intellectual capital and don't worry so much about the outcome.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit of a complicated answer to that question. That is to say, people are often taught Oh, just follow your passion, so on. And I chafe at that a little bit because I know a lot of kids Makes a lot of kids feel bad because they think, oh, I don't have a passion. And then the problem is finding it. And it's okay to not have a passion. It's okay to be a person who does a variety of different passenger as just be a taxpayer, be someone who's a good neighbor and so on. You don't have to have a great passion and be a giant success. So I want to put that out there because I firmly believe that because the advice I'm going to give could sound like, oh, you're recommending that and I'm not, which is just do stuff. Do what's engaging to you. If you're a student, don't worry so much about getting your undergraduate business major so you can go right away into a job. Because if you do that, it's a job you like. They're probably going to want you to get your MBA anyway and you're going to relearn that.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving out of fiction to nonfiction, guns, germs, and steel, just the scope of it. And he asks so many questions that would never occur to me at least to ask. And then... Ring some interesting analysis to bear on them. Some of them convincing, some of them less so, but the ambitiousness of it and the questions asked were just. Just terrific. And, you know, we started with Kahneman Taversky. And so it feels right to say thinking fast and slow is chock full of wisdom and just a brilliant explication of all the research in this area with Danny Kahneman's just gift for putting things just right”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, there's so many great books. Well, I'll give you a category for one. Anything that Ian McEwen writes is just brilliant. And it's fiction, but it's fiction that touches on, and it's fiction that touches on so many different areas of life and so many different things. But some of it having to do very related to judgment and decision-making and game theory, the beginning, the opening scene to his novel Enduring Love. Brilliant fictional depiction of game theory. It's all you need to know about game theory happens in that first very riveting scene. So anything by Ian McEwen, another moving out of fiction to, oh, and his kind of recent one, nutshell, which is a little bizarrely fascinating take on the Hamlet tale is brilliant.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had us read the now epic 1974 paper in Science on Heuristics and Biases. And so it's an embarrassing story that I would say, gee, when are we going to hear from the famous people? But one thing I can say in my defense at least, one thing that makes me feel better is at least I recognized when we read that paper, hey, man, this is really great stuff. And that changed what I planned to do in graduate school.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be reading too much into it. No, you're not. I mean, well, I'll tell it an embarrassing story about myself, which is I go to Stanford. It's chock full of these famous people, Walter Michelle of the marshmallow test, Gordon Bauer, a giant in the Cognitive Revolution, the people I plan to study with, Mark Lepper, Le Ross, and Lee Ross ran a seminar on an introduction to the faculty. Each week you bring in two other members of the faculty. We'd read their papers and find out what's going on there among the faculty. Great way to start a program. And in the first organizational meeting, Lee says, okay, that's what we're going to do. But the first week, we've got these visitors here. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. And so we're going to start with them. And internally, I say to myself, why these guys? I want to hear from the famous people because my undergraduate education.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not quite. Those two components are true, but they're melded together. That is to say, I went to college. Again, I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I didn't know what I wanted to do, but kind of like to argue with people, and I thought that would be a good field, the law. There's no pre-law, you can take anything as a pre-law person. And so I took a bunch of stuff and some of them psychology courses, like them, took another. Like that took another and then suddenly it dawned on me. Hey, I seem to like this psychology stuff. Can I make a career out of this? And it took a year off after undergraduate to sort of do I want to take that plunge and go to graduate school? And the answer was yes. And I'm really glad that the answer was yes.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the great pleasure of going to Stanford University, the number one psychology department then and now for a long time. It's had that ranking. At a great time, it was the height of the cognitive revolution in psychology. There's a lot of very exciting things happening, which is why I chose to go there. And then there were these surprising things. Amos Storsky and Daniel Kahneman were visiting there my very first year and started talking about this stuff I hadn't heard of that just seemed so compelling. It was sort of the dawn of the revolution in judgment and decision making and it was just a very heady time and they were generous with their time. My advisors, Mark Lepper and Lee Ross to incredibly insightful psychologists were very helpful. So it was just like being in Wittgenstein.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm the first person in my family to go to college. That could sound like, oh, that's a bad thing. Been studying gratitude a lot, and I think part of it stems from having grown up in an amazing part of the world at an amazing time, that is, Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. It was just a great place. It was pretty egalitarian world. Those of us whose parents didn't go to college mingled with those who did, and you never felt like you were part of a lower caste as a result of that. And obviously the weather there was sensational. You've got the beaches very close, Yosemite Valley very close. It was just an incredible place to have grown up.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've talked to a lot of coaches who will say, you know, one thing I have taken from that is that it reinforces really what my job is, which is to get my team the best shots. And I used to factor in how hot someone is. Now I'm going to factor that in less. It's really getting the ball in the hands of my best players on the best spots of the floor. And so it's reinforcing an alternative belief that they already have more than trying to get them to extinguish this other belief.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have people shoot for us and they identify. Just tell us when you're hot. And then afterwards, we say, you know, you said you were hot some number of times. You didn't say that some number of times. What percentage of the shots do you think you made after you said you were hot versus the times when you didn't say that and the overestimation is staggering? We know what percentage of shots they made when they said they were hot and they're wildly overestimating that. They're modestly underestimating how well they did when they said they weren't hot. So again, a departure between... Belief in reality”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wouldn't say any of the pushback is crazy. It was very firm. And I understand that. And again, precisely because it's such a compelling phenomenon when you're out there in the heat of the game and you've made several shots in a row. And then you hear about these psychologists, statisticians doing some analysis. It's easy to just can't be and just dismiss it. And they're very dismissive that, oh, what do they know? They're a bunch of psychologists. Well, psychologists play basketball too. And maybe we wouldn't have the hot hand as much as a more skilled player, but we do have it. So it wasn't crazy, but it was pretty dismissive. And again, with respect to... Initial hypothesis are people overestimating any strictness that might be there. The answer to that is very clear. In fact, we're running additional studies right now where”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practitioner's manual for nurses that refers to people who don't go through Kubleras' five stages in the order specified as pathological dyers. And just think how insidious that is. You've gotten the worst news you could possibly get that your life here is, you don't have much time left on Earth. You've got to deal with that. And now in addition to that, you have to deal with the fact that the people presumably there to help you think that you aren't doing it right. It's just adding a horrible insult to an already terrible injury.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But many people never get over it. And the world treats them badly. Like, what's wrong with you? I heard it's supposed to take about a year and you seem to have still be troubled by this. We're adding an extra burden onto those people. Some people aren't troubled right from the beginning, and that can seem perverse. Wait, you just lost a child. What's wrong with you that you didn't feel that way? Well, that happens. The problem with a firm belief in stage theories is that they take on this normative stance. This is what you should do. In fact, there are certain practitioners. It sounds like I'm making this up, but I wish I were. But there's a”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reaction to grief, not so much in reactions to their own death, although there's research on that too. And people are all over the map. Some people, the most common pattern, of course, is your devastated initially, and then you get over it.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pattern detection machinery in our heads, and it goes out and finds patterns. But no system is perfect. And so it overshoots sometimes. And so we see faces and clouds and a man on the moon and canals on Mars that aren't there. And the hot hand is or seeing more streakiness than is really there is another manifestation of that. Psychologists are very fond of stage theories that we go through these systematic stages to take us from the starting point to the end point. Kublerosis is just one of them. I'm not saying it's random, that is to say people willy-nilly go through all sorts of stages at different times. Maybe there is some order there, but certainly there's less than people are complicated and they act in all sorts of different ways and there is a lot of research on people's.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I talk about that in the book, in the same chapter that I talk about the hot hand, as both of them are a reflection of the fact that we tend to see more patterns in the world than are actually there. We've got this incredible...”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in reality, they aren't because if it's so much an unbalanced decision, you can go either way and you'll end up feeling pretty good about it.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think there's an important lesson there that is when we find ourselves in these circumstances where, oh my God, this is a weighty decision. I don't know, six of one, half dozen of the other. Well, if you find yourself where you really are torn and there are strong arguments either way, it's a close call, then just pick one. What you just described, all of that psychology that you bring to bear to make you happy with what you've chosen will be brought to bear and you'll be pretty happy with it. And those decisions, because it's six of one half dozen of the other, they feel like hard ones.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same purchase thought of for whatever reason as a deal versus not thought that way, it just makes all the difference in terms of how we feel about it, how much continued enjoyment we get. Same thing about virtually everything in our lives. And therefore, the determinants of understanding how people are going to interpret a given stimulus is the key to understanding how people are going to behave. It's the key to running a successful company. Certainly it's the key to running a successful political campaign.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. We get utility from all. I think the single biggest psychological fact about human beings, it's so simple. It's such a simple idea. But it's really powerful, says something about us, and it's sort of fallen to psychologists to remind the world of this. Economists often want to say that, well, let's just incentivize it, and then we'll get more of this behavior. Incentives work pretty well for things, but people don't respond to the incentives themselves. They respond to the meaning that they assign to those incentives. And more broadly, we don't respond to the stimuli we encounter. respond to the meaning that we assign to them. And there's so much flexibility in terms of how we construe things.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Three months, you don't even notice the size of the TV. Whereas for you, it's going to be a Fox one day. It's going to be a sunset another day, a sunrise, a third day, etc. It's going to be a different little gift each time that has provided this continuing enjoyment that you've received.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hopper ready to run on that subject. And I think your example of buying this place that you love so much and it hasn't diminished You right away talked about, oh, we moved to this neighborhood and we're sort of connected to the, and like the other people around you. And that's a case where you bought it for a social reason and it turns out to have been confirmed and you've got the great hiking ability and vista in the back. Compare that to a frequent motivation of people buying a new house. Oh, we need more square footage or we need three bathrooms rather than two. Well with big families used to live in really tiny houses and never really yeah and they function just fine. We could function just fine. And those are the kinds of things that people adapt to. But if you move”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We saw in our other research that people will often buy certain material possessions with the thought that that's going to give a boost to their social life, the prototypical example is, yeah, I need to get a 40-inch flat screen TV because I want to have everyone over for the Oscars and the Super Bowl. Sometimes that does happen, but people end up watching the Oscars by themselves or the Super Bowl by themselves more often than they expect. So the prediction is that you buy certain material things with the expectation it's going to connect you to other people and that turns out to be true less often than you expect. Whereas the experience thing, some of those you buy also with an eye toward doing it with other people and those tend to get confirmed more and that's part of the experiential advantage. So we have several studies.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're doing research. It's interesting that you raise that question. We're doing research right now on people's reasons for making certain purchases and are those reasons borne out in the particular question is.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course I recall. It's a long story. Takes the money, goes, you know, Bet's here, wins. Let her ride accumulation of money that ultimately...”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person who liked to spread money around, you're going to feel like I should spread this around. Money comes with almost a personality. People often talk about this in the context of getting a smallish bonus you didn't expect. You get a tax return and it's small. It feels like, hey, this is great. Let's go spend it. And people do. And they often spend it several times. It's used to justify going to this restaurant. You always wanted to go to getting tickets to the Celtic game or whatever. And you've spent it several times. If, in fact, it were a big inheritance, it comes with a lot of weightiness associated with it. Even though you have more money, you're less likely to spend it on that restaurant or those Celtic tickets. And instead Do something serious with it because it's a serious amount of money.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, economists tell us, decision makers tell us if we want to make the best decisions with our money, we should think of all of our assets and liabilities in terms of one overall integrated balance sheet. And in fact, that turns out to be true. We will make better decisions that way. Great. But we don't have the kinds of minds that either are capable of doing that or are inclined to do that. Instead, we put money into different accounts and we treat it differently. We treat money differently depending upon where it came from, how we got it. And there are all sorts of examples. It's very easy to illustrate. If you received an inheritance from an aunt, let's say who was very careful with her money, you're probably going to be more careful with that money than if your aunt was wild and crazy.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“more than $10,000 and we can lose sight of the context, that is to say, how much has inflation changed from when you had $10,000 to $20,000. There are obviously circumstances in which in real dollars the 20,000 is less than the $10,000 you used to have, but it's hard to get over that first impression of just being taken by the monetary value and to ignore context.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The money illusions really interesting to psychologists because it's another version of something you see all over the place, which is a difficulty we have in taking context into account. And so in psychology, there's this phenomenon known as the fundamental attribution error that if you see a dad and a kid in line at the grocery store and the dad yells at the kid, you can't help but think that's a mean father. We don't know what the context was that led up to it, what's gone on in the person's life, and how exceptional that might have been the only time that the dad ever yelled at his kid. But we can't help but look at the stimulus in front of us and draw conclusions. And with respect to the money illusion, $20,000 sounds a lot.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it plays out there the way it plays out everywhere, that is to say, or let's back up step, that, you know, when you cite that quote, it can sound silly in some ways it does sound silly. On the other hand, what job does our brain have? It's to make sense of the world. And we draw upon every possible cues that would make that job easier. And one cue that we draw upon is what we already know or what we already think we know. And therefore, what we know has to influence new information that comes in. And so if we have a strong prior belief that this industry is better positioned for the environment we now face rather than that industry, of course we should take that into account. If they're based on a solid foundation, they should influence our evaluation of new information.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which they are different, and you end up with the paradoxical result with East Germany and West Germany being both more similar and more dissimilar, logically impossible, but psychologically, the rules of similarity and dissimilarity judgments are such that both can seem very compelling. And it's the confirmation bias. You asked me how similar they are. I look for evidence of similarity, and I can find it for the countries I know more about than the countries I know less about. You ask me which two countries are more dissimilar. I'm looking for evidence of dissimilarity. I don't care which two countries are more similar dissimilar. It just shows you how deep the conformation bias runs.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that having a kid is a little bit like having a dog, but having a dog is nothing like having a kid, why that discrepancy? Why is North Korea a lot like China, but China's not really much like North Korea? And so he did this study where he asked people, which two countries this was in the 1980s, are more similar to one another, East Germany and West Germany or Ceylon and Nepal. The respondents know more about East Germany and West Germany, so they can think of more reasons, more ways in which they're similar. And so they say East Germany and West Germany is more similar. Okay, no big deal there. No one's made a problem. No one's made an error. He asked another group of participants which two countries are more dissimilar to one another, East Germany and West Germany. And they say East Germany and West Germany are more dissimilar to one another because they know more about East Germany and West Germany. They can think of ways in which”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To John, I think he's politically liberal. You might want to check that out. You might ask a very different question. John, don't you think we need to do something about global warming? Don't you think we need to do something about income inequality? And if he's liberal, he'll say yes, but if you're conservative, at least when it comes to income inequality, you're going to say, yeah, we need to do things about it. It might be different things than a liberal, but the thrust is you're going to get answers that support what you initially believed. And it's so all of this is to say that the confirmation bias runs really deep. And one of my favorite examples of this is an old study of Kahneman Taversky's, excuse me, of Amos Taversky's, who this was before he was interested in the kind of judgmental biases that economists have become interested in. He was just interested in judgments of similarity. How do we say that why do we say...”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the confirmation bias is even more insidious, more pervasive than that, that is, even if you don't care about what the situation or question, what the right answer might be, like should you award custody to this person or that person, we still engage in this. One example that I think makes this clear is suppose I'm hosting a dinner party and I tell you you're going to be sitting next to John. I think John's politically conservative. You just might want to, but you might want to test that out. I'm not sure. How would you test that out? Well, you would ask conservative oriented questions. You would say, John, don't you think the government is too intrusive sometimes? And then he, as a conservative, would say yes, but even a liberal would say, well, sometimes, sure, the government's too intrusive. If I told you, hey, you're going to be sitting next to you.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barry, that's great that you broke it down that way. That is to say people are very familiar with the idea that we're easier on evidence that supports what we want to believe and we're hard on evidence that rebuts what we want to believe and that's now part of the confirmation bias. That's a thing we recognize that great. People are also aware of the fact that if I want something to be true, I actively go out and look for evidence consistent with it. If I want something not to be true, I'll go actively look for evidence that's inconsistent with it. We can call that the confirmation bias. That's true. There's evidence to support that.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accept and therefore it's hard to really know whether we're doing a good job, but the impression is every bit it's there. We look around at the student body. You can't turn that impression off and the students look great. And so we think we did a good job.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a result of that, the database we have in our head is going to be somewhat biased. And we've already talked about a few examples of that, that is to say when you switch lines and it slows down, that's going to leave more of an impression than when you switch lines and it speeds up and that's going to distort your database. Cornell University, when it decides who gets to go there, it probably congratulates itself because we look around at the student body and they're terrific and we say, boy, we're really good at selecting people. Now, of course, we don't really know that because we don't know about the people who we rejected who could be there and maybe they do just as well. That is, people self-select, only really good students by and large or even applying to Cornell. And maybe we don't do as good a job as we think. The world can't show us the people that we didn't.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for a variety of reasons, and that's what the book was about exploring those different reasons. And one is that the world doesn't play fair. That is, it doesn't, doesn't put you through a series of controls.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to afford that bigger house, people often have to live farther away from their job and they have a longer commute. And one of the exceptions in this tendency that I described, this remarkable capacity for adaptation, is that people don't tend to adapt to the trauma of a long commute. And it's not surprising why that would be the case. That is, it's amorphous, highly variable thing. It's a different version of hell each time you're driving. Sometimes it's a snarl over here. Other time it's a nasty motorist there. It's different to it. And so you've made this terrible trade-off. You think you're going to be happier with the bigger house, you get the bigger house, you are happy for a while, then you adapt to it. You're saddled with this long commute to which you don't adapt. So you've lost out in the bargain.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you've identified a very interesting line of research of it would seem like one of the easiest things to predict would be how happy we're going to be making predictions about ourselves, predicting the world, of course, is hard, but it would seem to be easy to predict how we're going to react. And I think it's just a very compelling line of research that now many investigators have done showing that we're not so good prognosticators about our own enjoyment. And one of the examples that I most like in this area is that people feel like I'll be happier if I have a bigger house. And when you first move into it, you will be happier, again, before you adapt to this new amount of space. And that becomes the norm, this bigger house. And now you feel like you need even more and more. Anyway.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experiences change who you are, and you're a changed person, and you continue to benefit from that, your experiences connect you to other people in ways that your material goods don't. And that continues to be a gift that keeps on giving. And so it turns out, and I know a lot of research has shown this, that even though the experience comes and goes possibly in a flash, it lives on psychologically and provides more enduring satisfaction and enjoyment.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those kinds of experiences, at least, weren't subject to this adaptation, this hedonic treadmill, and so the question became, how broadly does that apply to experiences? And the hypothesis was, you don't adapt to the money that you spend, the pleasure that you get out of your experiences. You don't adapt to them as much, which in some ways is paradoxical. That is, most people have limited resources and people often say, you know, I know I would love a vacation right now, but we really need a new set of bookcases or we need a new bed or we need a new car or whatever. And at least that will always be there. And that's true in a material sense, but psychologically, it's the reverse. You adapt to the new bookcases. You adapt to the upgrade in your car, the things that you buy. And it turns out you don't adapt as much to your experiences.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to selfish pursuits, accumulating more, but selfless ones. You were just trying to do good in the world. I don't know if he used, I think he did use the mother Teresa example. Mother Teresa saves five people this week. She probably isn't the next week going, eh, five people, that doesn't cut it. I need to save more. I need to save more. And it's a compelling thought experiment. And it seemed like...”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“happiness. And so applying it to consumption, the things that we buy, you know, if I trade in my camry and get a Lexus, I'll be happier. Yeah, that's true. You will be for a little while. Pretty soon it's just a car like the other car and you don't notice it as much. And so one challenge for happiness researchers is if adaptation is an enemy of happiness, how do you combat that enemy? The great judgment and decision making researcher Robin Dawes had a thought experiment where he was talking about this hedonic treadmill. I need more and more to get the same level of happiness. He said, imagine you devoted your life.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That line of research stemmed from a finding, probably the biggest finding in the now quite extensive research on happiness or well-being, which is that we have a remarkable capacity to adapt to things. And that's a good capacity when bad things happen to us. Oh no, I've lost my job. Life's going to fall apart. Well, that is a bad thing, and you are miserable for a while, but we tend to adapt to it. Or many people think, oh, I don't think I'd even want to live if I lost the use of my legs, let's say. Well, turns out that people who've experienced that, yes, they are miserable right away, but they adapt and live lives that are as fulfilling as people who haven't had that misfortune. And this is just the probably biggest fact about the study of”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shrinking over time they often grow. You often think, oh, you know, if I'd only take in that class, I would have gone into this profession rather than this one Regret more of the things that they didn't do. I could have been a contender. I could have been this. I could have been that.”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the interesting part, this change from the close temporal proximity to a distant perspective. And over time, we do things with our, because our mistakes of action are so painful, we do things about them. We make amends to other people. We engage in what psychologists call cognitive dissonance reduction to make ourselves feel better about it. We identify, and part of that is identifying a silver lining. If you ask people about some of their biggest regrets, people will say, oh, I married the wrong person. But they will say, yeah, that was a mistake, but I wouldn't have these great kids if I hadn't done that. So the marriage ended, but it turned out to have been a good thing because I have these kids that I love. And so there's all this mental stuff you do to make yourself more comfortable with many, at least mistakes of action. Whereas things that you didn't do rather than...”
2018-01-25 · Masters in Business · Thomas D. Gilovich Talks About Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source