When it comes to sterilization, Denmark has had a rather turbulent history. In 1929, in the midst of rising social concerns regarding an increase in sex crimes and general “degeneracy,” the Danish government passed legislation bordering on eugenics, requiring sterilization in some men and women. Between 1929 and 1967, while the legislation was active, approximately 11,000 people were sterilized – roughly half of them against their will.

Then, the policy was changed so that sterilization was still available, still free, but not involuntary. And as you might expect, the sterilization rate in Denmark dropped down dramatically – and stayed this way until 2010.

Now we come to 2010. In only a few short months, the sterilization rate increased fivefold. No, this was not a regression to the old legislation; it was a result of free choice…

What happened?  Last year, the Danish government announced that sterilization, which had been free, would cost at least 7,000 kroner (~$1,300) for men and 13,000 kroner (~$2,500) for women as of January 1^st, 2011. Following the announcement, doctors performing sterilizations found that their patient load suddenly surged. People were scrambling to get sterilized while it was still free.

Now, it could be that the people who were already planning on getting sterilized at some point in the future just made their appointments a bit sooner, and conveniently saved some money.  But I can also imagine that (much like our research on free tattoos) there were many people who did not really think much about sterilization before the price change, but were so averse to giving up such a good deal that it pushed them to take the offer and undergo a fairly serious procedure.

And although we usually don’t think about sterilization as an impulse purchase, it might just become one when a free deal is about to be snipped.

Here I discuss Chapter 4 from Upside of Irrationality, The Not-Invented-Here Bias: Why “My” Ideas Are Better than “Yours”.

Here I discuss Chapter 3 from Upside of Irrationality, The IKEA Effect: Why We Overvalue What We Make.

In the course of our lives, we come across countless opportunities to help others. The occasional homeless person or charity asks for a donation, or the Red Cross is collecting blood across the street. But most of the time, these opportunities present themselves through our social networks — simply because we interact most often with our friends. One important difference between helping friends and helping strangers is that we know our friends can pay us back in the future, whereas strangers can usually only pay it forward. Of course, all people are not able to help others to the same degree; some people have a lot to spare while others get by on a tighter budget.

My friend Sevgi and I wondered whether people are more generous when others have the opportunity to help them back in the future, and whether people reciprocate based on the value of the gift they received. Our main questions were:

1)    Do people give more when they know they may get something in return?

2)    Do receivers care whether their gift is more valuable in an absolute or relative sense?

To look at these questions, we had people play a simple game as one of two players: lets call them player A and player B. We give $1 to player A and $100 to player B (they both see how much the other gets). Player A can send any amount (of his $1) to player B, and then player B decides how much (of his $100) to send back. In another version of the game, player B cannot give anything back.

Does player A send more money to player B when he knows that B can send money back? How much money does player B send back when player A sends nothing, some of his money, or even his entire dollar?

Looking at the results, we see that people are a) strategic when they offer money initially and b) reciprocating after they have been given money. On average, player A sends more to player B if he knows that B can send something back. And the more that player A sends to player B, the more he receives.

However, the amount sent back by player B does not depend on the absolute value of player A’s initial offer, but on the proportion of player A’s wealth that was offered. What does this mean? If player A has $50 instead of $1 and sends half of it to B ($25), he gets back almost the same amount of money from B as he gets after sending half of $1 (50 cents!).

So, what is the lesson du jour? It turns out that people with limited resources can gain just as much from acting altrustically as those who are well-endowed. Don’t get discouraged by a thin wallet when given the chance to help others — after all, it is your generosity that counts.

~Merve Akbas~

Here I discuss Chapter 2 from Upside of Irrationality, The Meaning of Labor: What Legos Can Teach Us about the Joy of Work.

I am interested in the morally ambiguous realm of music/video/book piracy, a place where everyone has something to say and no qualms about saying it. A couple weeks ago, over a chocolate croissant, I was having what was probably my 5,637^th conversation on this topic, and my new friend (for his own protection let’s just call him Steve — apologies to all the Steves out there) began voicing his opinions: he was vehemently against illegal downloading, but fine with checking CDs out from the library and making personal copies for himself.

The conversation went as follows:

Me: “You know that’s illegal?”

Steve: “It’s a gray area.”

Me: “According to the law, it is not.”

Steve: “I still think it is kind of gray. And I need to put the songs on my iPod to listen to them, so I have to copy them anyway.”

After this conversation I was left wondering whether Steve was a criminal anomaly or if the rest of America was on his side. So I divided a sample of Americans into two groups and had them rate the moral “wrongness” of the two types of piracy. Group A) was told that Steve downloaded an album online without paying and Group B) was told that Steve checked out the CD from the library and made a personal copy.

The Conclusion:  America agrees with Steve. People generally viewed Steve’s actions as significantly less morally adverse when he made a copy from the library.  From a legal perspective, Steve had committed an equally unlawful act, but Americans still viewed the crimes differently.

So how could (illegally) copying from the library be viewed as less wrong than (illegally) downloading?

Illegal downloading has a sting against it while copying does not. Copying does not feel as much like stealing. There’s also a fellow person or institution (like a library or generous friend) to share your sin with. Pirates are a tainted outgroup, but anyone can be a copier of media.

Libraries make it okay. It can be safely assumed that libraries know that we have the ability to copy CDs but make no efforts to stop us; by providing us with the opportunity, they are more or less condoning piracy.

It’s so easy to copy CDs.  For this study our sample consisted mostly of people who do not know how to illegally download online (e.g., they were not particularly aware of cyber lockers or torrent clients). In other words, they probably know how to copy and burn a CD but not illegally download music.  I believe that most of the moral qualms people have against piracy would be wiped away if they just learned a virus-free, super-easy way to pirate high quality media.

I think the “easy” factor is partially why people view streaming illegal content (watching the content within browser without downloading it) as different from illegally downloading. Many illegal streamers say they are okay with streaming but not downloading because streaming is just “borrowing.” I think that, in actuality, people choose not to download because they do not know how, they find downloading to be a hassle, or are scared of viruses rather than because of their high moral standards. To avoid looking incompetent, they say (and believe) that the reason they don’t illegally download is because that type of piracy is morally wrong. But the kind they can do and easily benefit from (like copying from library CDs) is okay.

If you would like to help us out and provide any strong (or morally gray) opinions, please share them with us

~Troy Campbell~

Here I discuss Chapter 1 from Upside of Irrationality, Paying More for Less: Why Big Bonuses Don’t Always Work.

Throughout my life, I have loved eating meat, but my two best friends at Duke are vegetarians, and because of them I was persuaded to read Eating Animals by one of my favorite contemporary authors, Jonathan Safran Foer. While Foer mainly writes novels, his newest book is non-fiction, and discusses many topics that revolve around, well…eating animals.

One of the main takeaways from the book is that the vast majority (about 99%) of the meat we eat in America comes from factory farms, where animals face a shocking level of unnecessary suffering, a kind of suffering that is generally unseen at local, organic farms. After reading the book, I still eat meat, but only if it comes from humanely-raised sources.

While reading Eating Animals, I couldn’t help but think of behavioral economics (a topic which, admittedly, is often on my mind anyway), and how so many behavioral economic principles seem to apply to various patterns of people’s general thoughts, emotions, and actions regarding meat. While I do not have the empirical data to support my musings, I figured I would share them as “food for thought.”

Identifiable Victim Effect: The massive scale on which factory farms operate is precisely what makes it so difficult to sympathize with the animals within them.

• Animal Abuse: Many people would be horrified if they saw a dog being hit by its owner, yet are relatively unconcerned (or just don’t think about) that the piece of meat they are eating undoubtedly lived a life of incomparably greater pain.
• Hunting: Many find hunting immoral, yet animals that are hunted would generally have lived a much better life up until death than animals in factory farms (e.g., the Sarah Palin hunting controversy and Aaron Sorkin’s infamous letter criticizing her, even though he is not a vegetarian, and so presumably eats factory-farmed meat..

One Step Removed (see the “Coke vs. dollar” study): Many would find it immoral to treat a cow, pig, or chicken the way that the ones we eventually eat are, but aren’t fazed with it being done for us indirectly by others (or just don’t think about it either way).

Social Norms and “Us” vs. “Them” (see the CMU vs. UPitt cheating study): Many non-vegetarians see others eating meat indiscriminately and so think doing so is OK, and may not stop and think much about a vegetarian’s reasons for not eating meat (which may be reasons non-vegetarians would actually agree with, too) because vegetarians may automatically be categorized as a fringe group.

“Hot” vs. “Cold” States (see the “laptop” study): Our food decisions (and therefore, our thinking about food) often occur when we are already in the “hot” state of hunger. When we are not hungry at all (in a “cold” state), we are probably more receptive to the logical arguments against eating factory-farmed meat, and might agree to do so. But the hungrier we get, the more likely we are to do something we might think of as unethical. This is the same reason that people find it so easy to find the resolve to quit smoking just after a cigarette, but nearly impossible when cravings set back in.

Paradox of Choice: Limiting our food options (by cutting out factory-farmed food options) should help us better appreciate the options that remain for us.

Dating: I was told that many vegetarians will only date fellow vegetarians, and the majority of vegetarians are female (60-67%)…so the demand for potential vegetarian males is much greater than the supply. Thus, for males, it would be irrational not to be a vegetarian to allow yourself access to this wonderful market of potential dates.

~Jared Wolfe~

The Irrationality of Organizational Escalation: The Danger of Spider-man & Overcommitment 

By Henry Han-yu Shen

Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark is an upcoming rock musical featuring music and lyrics from U2’s Bono and The Edge and originally directed by Julie Taymor, best known for the hit musical The Lion King.

This musical is also the most expensive Broadway production in history, with a record-setting initial project budget of $52 million. The show’s opening has been repeatedly delayed while the production cost continues to accrue, currently totaling a whopping 70 million dollars. The final estimated budget approaches 100 million dollars, with no guarantee of profit return and below-average reviews.

Spider-man’s situation exemplifies a classic case of organizational failure.  Marked by producers’ continuously irrational contributions of monetary support to a seemingly hopeless project. In many ways this case is similar to the failed Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant program as analyzed by Ross and Staw (1993). The Shoreham project also experienced an escalation of project cost – from an initial $75 million to the final cost of $5 billion – and it a classical example of how organizations become increasingly committed to losing courses of action over time.

We can draw several parallels by comparing the Spider-man Broadway production to organizational escalation. We can see that economic data alone cannot easily deter organizational leaders from withdrawing from a full-scale course of action, especially in cases involving something that is highly subjective in its value (such as a Broadway production). When we consider that the cost of production for Spider-man continues to rise, the initial psychological over-commitment of the producers can become even stronger. Such forces appear to have come into play, trapping the producers into a losing situation while they continue to throw money into the project.  It is important for future producers, or any organizational leaders, to keep in mind the existence and properties of these different types of escalating determinants in order to avoid clouded judgment and behavior when making decisions.