The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (36 page)

Our editor, John Mahaney, provided professional advice and assistance in polishing this manuscript, lending keen insights to sharpen our thoughts. Our graphic designer designed the front cover, which effectively delivers our message. We thank our publisher, PublicAffairs, who believed in us enough to allow us to write this book in the manner that conveys our key message, and for giving us much-needed flexibility.

Finally, a number of people provided comments that helped to shape this manuscript. These include Jennifer List, Ayelet Gneezy, Augie List, Alec Brandon, Molly Wright Buck, Joseph Buck, Winnie Pitcock, David “Lenny” Haas, Michael Price, Anya Samak, Edie Dobrez, Katie Baca-Motes, Sally Sadoff, Jeff Livingston, Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner, Dave Novgorodsky, David Herberich, Annika List, Sandi Einerson, Jeff Einerson, Ron Huberman, Scott Cook, Freddie Chaney, Michael Goldberg, Pete Williams, Joe Gonzalez, Ryan “Mamba” Pitcock, Eric Faoro, Pete Bartolomei, John Friel, Michael McCallister, Brian Mullaney, Min Lee, Katie Spring, and our friends and associates at Intuit and Humana. Thanks to everyone for all your help and support along the way.

NOTES

Introduction

1
. Syed Z. Ahmed, “What Do Men Want?”
New York Times
, February 15, 1994, A21.

2
. David Brooks, “What You’ll Do Next,”
New York Times
, April 15, 2013.

3
. When we use the pronoun “we” throughout this book, it means that either or both of us were involved in the experiments described, most often with other researchers as noted. Also, at certain points in the book we use pseudonyms to protect those who preferred anonymity.

4
.
All in the Family
, Season 2. Accessed on YouTube, March 25, 2013,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_UBgkFHm8o
.

5
. Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on The Negro Question,”
Fraser’s Magazine
(December 1849). Reprinted as a separate pamphlet (1853), reproduced in
The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle
vol. 13 (1864).

Chapter 1: How Can You Get People to Do What You Want?

1
. Uri Gneezy, Steven Meier, and Pedro Rey-Biel, “When and Why Incentives (Don’t) Work to Modify Behavior,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
25 (2011): 191–210,
http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/jep_published.pdf
.

2
. Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,”
Journal of Legal Studies
29 (January 2000): 1–17.

3
. Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “Pay Enough or Don’t Pay At All,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
(August 2000): 791–810,
http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/pay-enough.pdf
.

4
. As our friend Dan Ariely has shown, the currency with which you are paying is important. In particular, money is different than most other forms of payment. Ariely and his research partner, James Heyman, started by showing that students who got no payment for a task (helping other students load a sofa into a van) invested more effort than people who received just a small amount of cash. Another group received a candy bar. As they expected, they found that people who were paid with candy put in more effort than those who got a small amount of money (and the same effort as those who were not paid). But here comes the interesting part: in a different treatment, they left the price tag on the candy. They predicted that once students knew the retail value of the candy they’d put out as much effort as those who received the cash payment. And indeed that happened. See “Effort for Payment,”
Psychological Science
15, no. 11 (2004).

5
. Uri Gneezy, Ernan Haruvy, and Hadas Yafe, “The Inefficiency of Splitting the Bill,”
Economic Journal
114, no. 495 (April 2004): 265–280.

6
. Our friends Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmandier demonstrated this in “Paying Not to Go to the Gym,”
American Economic Review
96 (2006): 694–719,
http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~ulrike/Papers/gym.pdf
.

7
. Steven A. Burd, “How Safeway Is Cutting Health-Care Costs,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 12, 2009.

8
. See David S. Hilzenrath, “Misleading Claims About Safeway Wellness Incentives Shape Health-Care Bill,”
Washington Post
, January 17, 2010.

9
. Gary Charness and Uri Gneezy, “Incentives to Exercise,”
Econometrica
77 (2009): 909–931.

Chapter 2: What Can Craigslist, Mazes, and a Ball and Bucket Teach Us About Why Women Earn Less Than Men?

1
.
Archive of Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce
, January 14, 2005. See also “Lawrence Summers,” Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#cite_note-harvard2005%E2%80%9336
(last accessed March 26, 2013).

2
. Daniel J. Hemel, “Summers’ Comments on Women and Science Draw Ire,”
The Harvard Crimson
, January 14, 2005,
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/14/summers-comments-on-women-and-science/
.

3
. “Fast Facts: Degrees Conferred by Sex and Race,” National Center for Education Statistics,
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
(last accessed March 26, 2013); “Women in Management in the United States, 1960–Present,” Catalyst,
http://www.catalyst.org/publication/207/women-in-management-in-the-united-states-1960-present
(last accessed March 26, 2013); and Patricia Sellers, “New Yahoo CEO Mayer Is Pregnant,”
CNN Money
, July 16, 2012,
http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/mayer-yahoo-ceo-pregnant/
(last accessed March 26, 2013).

4
. “Working Women: Still Struggling,”
The Economist
, November 25, 2011,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/working-women
.

5
. See Jeffrey A. Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, and John A. List, “Do Competitive Work Places Deter Female Workers? A Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment on Gender Differences in Job-Entry Decisions,” NBER Working Paper w16546, November 2010.

6
. We ended up offering jobs to some applicants.

7
. It is not appropriate—and in some cases it’s illegal—to ask the job applicant about their gender. So we resorted to a tried and true method to determine whether each applicant was male or female—the applicant’s first name. Based on probabilities derived from the Social Security Administration (SSA) database on name popularity by gender and birth year in the various cities, we assigned gender. For any names not included in the SSA database, we used an additional database created by baby-name collector Geoff Peters, which calculates gender ratios by first name, using the Internet to analyze patterns of name usage for over 100,000 first names. Finally, for gender-neutral names, where neither database yielded a large enough gender ratio to make a confident assignment, we searched the Internet for gender identifiers of the actual subjects themselves on their social-networking websites. In the end, we are pretty confident that we had the genders correct.

8
. For a laboratory test of this, see Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund, “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
122, no. 3 (2007): 1067–1101.

9
. Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle, and Aldo Rustichini, “Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
118, no. 3 (2003): 1049–1074,
http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gender-differences.pdf

10
. Much has been written about the reasons why girls feel discouraged in math, engineering, and science and are outnumbered in science, technology, and mathematics professions. See Valerie Strauss, “Decoding Why Few Girls Choose Science, Math,”
Washington Post
, February 1, 2005,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52344–2005Jan31.html
; and Jeanna Bryner, “Why Men Dominate Math and Science Fields,” LiveScience, October 10, 2007,
http://www.livescience.com/1927-men-dominate-math-science-fields.html
(last accessed March 26, 2013).

11
. Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “Gender and Competition at a Young Age,”
American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings
94, no. 2 (2004): 377–381,
http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gender.pdf
.

12
. Unlike most of our large-scale experiments—such as one we are currently conducting in the Chicago Public Schools—this investigation in far-flung locations would have to be relatively small in scale and use some of the techniques that might be used in a laboratory setting. We call this kind of research an “artefactual field experiment” or a “lab-in-the-field” study. Uri Gneezy, Kenneth L. Leonard, and John A. List, “Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence from a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society,”
Econometrica
77, no. 5 (2009): 1637–1664,
http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gender-differences-competition.pdf
.

13
. Dorothy L. Hodgson, “Gender, Culture and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist,” in
Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa
, ed. D.L. Hodgson (London: James Currey, 1639, 1641, 2000).

14
. “Male Boards Holding Back Female Recruitment, Report Says,”
BBC News
, May 28, 2012,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18235815
.

15
. Barbara Black, “Stalled: Gender Diversity on Corporate Boards,” University of Dayton Public Law Research Paper no. 11–06,
http://www.udayton.edu/law/_resources/documents/law_review/stalled_gender_diversity_on_corporate_boards.pdf
.

16
. Aileen Lee, “Why Your Next Board Member Should Be a Woman,” TechCrunch, February 19, 2012,
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/19/why-your-next-board-member-should-be-a-woman-why-your-next-board-member-should-be-a-woman/
(last accessed March 26, 2013).

Chapter 3: What Can a Matrilineal Society Teach Us About Women and Competition?

1
. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,”
Science
162 (1968): 1243–1248.

2
. This framing manipulation is taken from our friend James Andreoni, who famously introduced interesting variants of the public goods game.

3
. Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever,
Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation—and Positive Strategies for Change
(New York: Bantam, 2007).

4
. See Andreas Grandt and John A. List, “Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment,” NBER, working paper, 2012.

5
. “Best Companies for Women’s Enhancement,” Working Mother,
http://www.workingmother.com/best-companies/deloitte-3
(last accessed March 26, 2013).

6
. See Richard A. Lippa,
Gender, Nature and Nurture
(Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2005).

7
. Steffen Andersen, Seda Ertac, Uri Gneezy, John A. List, and Sandra Maximiano, “Gender, Competitiveness and Socialization at a Young Age: Evidence from a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society,” forthcoming in
The Review of Economics and Statistics
.

Chapter 4: How Can Sad Silver Medalists and Happy Bronze Medalists Help Us Close the Achievement Gap?

1
. Thomas D. Snyder and Sally A. Dillow,
Digest of Education Statistics 2010
(Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, 2011).

2
. See Richard Knox, “The Teen Brain: It’s Just Not Grown Up Yet,” National Public Radio, March 1, 2010,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124119468
. For a fascinating insight into teenage brains, see
Frontline
’s program, “Inside the Teenage Brain,”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/
.

3
. Our friend and colleague Roland Fryer, a coauthor on some of the work discussed here, has made an important effort to implement financial incentives in schools across the United States.

4
. Sally is now an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego.

5
. To see their stories and learn more about our experiment, watch the fourth episode in the 2010 documentary “Freakonomics” (“Can You Bribe a Ninth Grader to Succeed?”). Note that in the documentary, Urail King wins the lottery and the ride in the limo: it is unclear that this moment was actually supposed to be a dream sequence. Although Urail was not actually chosen, he did improve his grades enough to qualify for the lottery. For the academic paper on which this episode is based, see Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, and Sally Sadoff, “The Effect of Performance-Based Incentives on Educational Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment,” unpublished, 2011.

6
. Levitt, List, and Sadoff, “The Effect of Performance-Based Incentives.”

7
. Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, and Sally Sadoff, “The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance,” NBER Working Paper 18165 (June 2012).

8
. This idea comes from Victoria H. Medvec, Scott F. Madey, and Thomas Gilovitch, “When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction Among Olympic Medalists,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
69 (1995): 603–610,
http://www.psych.cornell.edu/sec/pubPeople/tdg1/Medvec.Madey.Gilo.pdf
.