Human behavior should not be thought of in terms of good and bad but rather as economic incentives, said author and economist Stephen J. Dubner.
Dubner, co-author of the best seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, spoke to a crowd of students in the Union Ballroom last week.
“You (students) are probably all honest people because honesty in this culture is directly correlated to success,” Dubner said sarcastically. “Since you’re here (in college), you’re successful already, which connotes to me you’re all honest for the most part.”With that seemingly complimentary remark, however, Dubner immediately called most of the audience liars because only a few students raised their hands when asked if they washed their hands after going to the restroom.
Dubner said studies show most people do not wash their hands, so U students lied because they had no reason to reveal such a personal truth, not because they are good or bad people but because there was no incentive — a concept closely studied in economic theory.
“People are not good, people are not bad, people are people and people respond to the incentives you give them,” Dubner said. “So to generate good behavior, you need to give them good incentives — it’s behavioral economics.”
During Dubner’s hour-long talk, he shared a myriad of stories illustrating how small external factors influence human behavior.
“The talk was inspiring just because he presented how people act depending on different situations and what kind of incentives you have,” said Victor Meier, a senior in economics.
Dubner talked about a study in which doctors were asked under nurse supervision to see how often they washed their hands at the hospital. Under supervision, 73 percent of the doctors reported washing their hands while without nurses present only 9 percent washed. He explained that the doctors had an incentive to wash their hands when nurses were watching them.
He said many surveys, especially self-reported data, are unreliable because of the circumstances the studies were conducted under and that often, the best way to resolve problematic situations is to invent technology that circumvents human behavior.
One such example was an Australian experiment that asked doctors not to wear neckties, which sometimes touched open wounds, but didn’t ask them to wash their hands anymore than normal. Less bacteria was spread, and fewer patients became sick from diseases different from what they were admitted to the hospital for.
Dubner said he recommended similar methods to resolving global warming, because he felt trying to change human behavior without a real incentive is difficult.
Dubner finished with many examples of behavioral economics games conducted by different professors hoping to understand human behavior based on different incentives. In slightly different settings, the studies concluded slightly different findings.
If a person could give a small amount of his money to another person, he would do so usually as long as the recipient knows who performed the kind gesture. The experiments also concluded that if a person is wealthier, another person might consider taking some of the money from him or her and that if a wealthier person worked just as hard for their money as another person, that person would most likely not take any of it.
Dubner said such behavior explained altruistic behavior, people cheating large companies and people simply not giving to others but not taking either.
“I thought it was worthwhile how Dubner offered some creative insight on human behavior, and I then washed my hands repeatedly after his talk,” said Brian Martain, a junior in mass communication.
“People could make better decisions for themselves and others if they think more like an economist and not on emotion purely but with assessment of data and an understanding of incentives,” Dubner told The Daily Utah Chronicle.
Tyler CobbStudents line up to have Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner sign their books and posters. Dubner gave a speech previewing his new book before the signing.
