The Science of Happiness, Motivation, and Meaning | Dan Ariely | Big Think

The Science of Happiness, Motivation, and Meaning

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Motivation is a mysterious mechanism. It exists within all of us, but lays dormant unless unlocked. The 'how' is the difficult part, something business and individuals struggle with to varying degrees. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has found that there’s a dissonance between what we think motivates people and what actually does. The most simple formula for motivation, and the one we reach for the most often, is that money = motivation. Luxury rewards are a powerful idea, but are they really what drive us?

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DAN ARIELY:

Dan Ariely is the James B Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. He is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and co-founder of BEworks, which helps business leaders apply scientific thinking to their marketing and operational challenges. His books include Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best-sellers. as well as The Honest Truth about Dishonesty and his latest, Irrationally Yours.

Ariely publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science and CNN.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Dan Ariely: So when we think about what motivates people maybe the first thing we think about is what we think motivates people and what don’t we understand motivates people. And maybe the first misunderstanding is about the pleasure principle. So we have this idea of we have the right to pursue happiness and we’re trying to be happy and that’s really what we’re pursuing – happiness. But think about it. What gives you happiness in a way that is observable? Maybe sitting on the beach drinking a mojito or maybe sitting on the sofa watching a sitcom. But if you do almost anything that is useful, meaningful, that you take pride of it’s not the same things. But imagine you have a whole life of sitting on the beach drinking mojitos. How happy would that life be? So the first I think mistake is that we pursue momentary happiness rather than longer term happiness. So we do the things that will make us laugh out loud today kind of. Not always laugh out loud but kind of like that. And we don’t do the things that are difficult and complex and challenging but give us a very different sense of happiness. Think about something like running a marathon. You don’t see anybody happy. Like if you came as an alien and you image peoples’ brains and you looked at their facial expressions as they’re running a marathon you would say somebody’s punishing them.

Like they are paying for something terrible they’ve done and this is how they’re paying their debt to society. But it is kind of miserable but it’s also meaningful and create a sense of achievement in someone. So we’re pursuing momentary pleasure rather than truly understanding the depth of what happiness is or what meaning is. And then the second thing is that we’re trying to figure out how we externally motivate people and we have usually a very simple equation that says motivation equals money. And if you’re not working hard enough or doing something and they’re just not paying you enough or not giving you a bonus in the right way then we just jigger around bonuses and payment and we say oh, let’s change the payment this way and change the payment this way and give is slightly big bonuses here and slightly big bonuses there and we’ll create point systems for evaluation and all kind of things. The beauty of human nature is that lots of things motivate us. A sense of accomplishment and achievement, our title, our connection to work, our connection to people at work, competing with other people. All of those things motivate us. So we write a motivation equation we would write motivation equals yes, money is important but so is achievement, sense of progress, competition, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And the question is how do we use all of them to create motivation. And in physics people look for the perpetual motion machine. How do we get energy from nothing, right, and continue growing. In motivation there is something like that so imagine two businesses. In one of them the business doesn’t care about motivation. In one of them they care deeply. In the first business people are miserable and the business is mis...

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