Dan Ariely - The Upside of Irrationality - The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

Obviously, NBA players are not bankers. The NBA is much more selective than the financial industry; very few people are sufficiently skilled to play professional basketball, while many, many people work as professional bankers. As we’ve seen, it’s also easier to get positive returns from high incentives when we’re talking about physical rather than cognitive skills. NBA players use both, but playing basketball is more of a physical than a mental activity (at least relative to banking). So it would be far more challenging for the bankers to demonstrate “clutch” abilities when the task is less physical and demands more gray matter. Also, since the basketball players don’t actually improve under pressure, it’s even more unlikely that bankers would be able to perform to a higher degree when they are under the gun.

One congressman publicly questioned the ethics of very large bonuses when he addressed the annual awards dinner of the trade newspaper American Banker at the New York Palace Hotel in 2004. Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who, at the time, was the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee (he’s currently the chairman) and hardly your run-of-the-mill, flattering “Thank you all so much for inviting me” speaker, began with a question: “At the level of pay that those of you who run banks get, why the hell do you need bonuses to do the right thing?” He was answered by an abyss of silence. So he went on: “Do we really have to bribe you to do your jobs? I don’t get it. Think what you are telling the average worker—that you, who are the most important people in the system and at the top, your salary isn’t enough, you need to be given an extra incentive to do your jobs right.”

As you may have guessed, two things happened, or rather did not happen, after this speech. First, no one answered his questions; second, no standing ovation was given. But Frank’s point is important. After all, bonuses are paid with shareholders’ money, and the effectiveness of those expensive payment schemes is not all that clear.

The truth is that all of us, at various times, struggle and even fail when we perform tasks that matter to us the most. Consider your performance on standardized tests such as the SAT. What was the difference between your score on the practice tests and your score on the real SAT? If you are like most people, the result on your practice tests was most likely higher, suggesting that the pressure of wanting to perform well led you to a lower score.

The same principle applies to public speaking. When preparing to give a speech, most people do just fine when they practice their talk in the privacy of their offices. But when it’s time to stand up in front of a crowd, things don’t always go according to plan. The hypermotivation to impress others can cause us to stumble. It’s no coincidence that glossophobia (the fear of public speaking) is right up there with arachnophobia (fear of spiders) on the scary scale.

As a professor, I have had a lot of personal experience with this particular form of overmotivation. Early in my academic career, public speaking was difficult for me. During one early presentation at a professional conference in front of many of my professors, I shook so badly that every time I used the laser pointer to emphasize a particular line on a projected slide, it raced all over the large screen and created a very interesting light show. Of course, that just made the problem worse and, as a result, I learned to make do without a laser pointer. Over time and with a lot of experience, I became better at public speaking, and my performance doesn’t suffer as much these days.

Despite years of relatively problem-free public speaking, I recently had an experience where the social pressure was so high that I flubbed a talk at a large conference in front of many of my colleagues. During one session at a conference in Florida, three colleagues and I were going to present our recent work on adaptation, the process through which people become accustomed to new circumstances (you’ll read more about this phenomenon in chapter 6, “On Adaptation”). I had carried out some studies in this area, but instead of talking about my research findings, I planned to give a fifteen-minute talk about my personal experience in adapting to my physical injuries and present some of the lessons I had learned. I practiced this talk a few times, so I knew what I was going to say. Aside from the fact that the topic was more personal than is usual in an academic presentation, I did not feel that the talk was that much different from others I have given over the years. As it turned out, the plan did not match the reality in the slightest.

I started the lecture very calmly by describing my talk’s objective, but, to my horror, the moment I started describing my experience in the hospital, I teared up. Then I found myself unable to speak. Avoiding eye contact with the audience, I tried to compose myself as I walked from one side of the room to the other for a minute or so. I tried again but I could not talk. After some more pacing and another attempt to talk, I was still unable to talk without crying.

It was clear to me that the presence of the audience had amplified my emotional memory. So I decided to switch to an impersonal discussion of my research. That approach worked fine, and I finished my presentation. But it left me with a very strong impression about my own inability to predict the effects of my own emotions, when combined with stress, on my ability to perform.

WITH MY PUBLIC failure in mind, Nina, Uri, George, and I created yet another version of our experiments. This time, we wanted to see what would happen when we injected an element of social pressure into the experimental mix.

In each session of this experiment, we presented eight students at the University of Chicago with thirteen sets of three anagrams, and paid them for each of the anagrams they solved. As an example, try to rearrange the letters of the following meaningless words to form meaningful ones (do this before you look at the footnote * ):

1. SUHOE

Your solution:

2. TAUDI

Your solution:

3. GANMAAR

Your solution:

In eight of the thirteen trials, participants solved their anagrams working alone in private cubicles. In the other five trials, they were instructed to stand up, walk to the front of the room, and try to solve the anagrams on a large blackboard in plain view of the other participants. In these public trials, performing well on the anagrams was more important, since the participants would not only receive the payment for their performance (as in the private trials) but would also stand to reap some social rewards in the form of the admiration of their peers (or be humiliated if they failed in front of everyone). Would they solve more anagrams in public—when their performance mattered more—or in private, when there was no social motivation to do well? As you’ve probably guessed, the participants solved about twice as many anagrams in private as in public.

THE PSYCHOANALYST AND concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl described a related example of choking under social pressure. In Man’s Search for Meaning , Frankl wrote about a patient with a persistent stutter who, try as he might, could not rid himself of it. In fact, the only time the poor fellow had been free of his speech problem was once when he was twelve years old. In that instance, the conductor of a streetcar had caught the boy riding without a ticket. Hoping the conductor would pity him for his stutter and let him off, the boy tried to stutter—but since he did not have any incentive to speak without stuttering, he was unable to do it! In a related example, Frankl describes a patient with a fear of perspiring: “Whenever he expected an outbreak of perspiration, this anticipatory anxiety was enough to precipitate excessive sweating.” In other words, the patient’s high social motivation to be sweat-free ironically led to more perspiration or, in economic terms, to lower performance.