Mind Games

Ideas of what motivate people / turn them off, or even influence them have always interested me... hopefully it doesn't have much to do with the megalomaniac side of me:

• The Psychology of Being Suckered: how and why people misjudge probability. (New York Times, TierneyLab)
• Because people think of financial decisions and social/softer decisions differently, thus attempting to motivate people with financial and social incentives can actually work against each other. (Incentive Intelligence Blog)
• You may not be procrastinating for the reasons you thought: "for Steel, procrastination can be explained by an insight borrowed from behavioural economics called hyperbolic discounting. This is the tendency to value near-term rewards more than long-term ones. For instance, some people will choose a payoff of $50 today over $100 tomorrow." (Toronto Star)
• Some thoughts on why stories matter to the work a business does - both in marketing and motivating employees (Seth Godin Blog)
  
• Steven Levitt, an author of Freakonomics, reviews Nudge, a book that explores behavioural economics (something he is skeptical of, which actually surprises me given his own book). Nudge is described as: "Since people don’t think very hard about the choices they make, it is a lot easier to trick them into doing what you want than to try to educate them or incentivize them to change their behavior. There are many ways to trick people, but one of the easiest is simply by giving thought to the way choices are arrayed to them, or what they call “choice architecture.”"