No. of Recommendations: 25
Back when I was working with younger people on projects that benefited from what we used to call objectivity, I would earnestly recommend they devote 75 minutes of their lives to Charlie's 1995 lecture at the Harvard Business School entitled,
Twenty-four standard causes of human misjudgment. Alas, there is no video of the talk and without video most of these folks didn't have the patience to listen to it all the way through. At least, I never got any feedback that indicated they had gotten half as much from it as I did.
Many folks on this board are probably familiar with it, but I'm posting the audio-only Youtube link in case any are not. His label for the first item on his list was "Under-recognition of the power of what psychologists call reinforcement and economists call incentives."
"Well, you could say everybody knows that," Charlie said. "Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives and all my life I’ve underestimated it."
I can barely remember my phone number these days, but this sentence stuck in my memory. It helped me to resist unproductive value judgments and to work through problems, particularly in the labor-management space, just by taking the time to figure out the various players' obvious incentives.
Charlie credits Robert Cialdini's book
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion with filling in the holes in his own theories of the most common causes of human misjudgment, so I bought the book, but I did not find it as compelling as Charlie's talk, maybe because Charlie is the superior storyteller. The practical examples in this talk, many business-related, helped me to understand derailments along the epistemological tracks that had previously been mysteries to me.
In what has been dubbed our current "post-truth" era, it is more difficult than ever to understand why people believe the things they believe. Charlie's talk seems almost quaint now, devoid of examples of social media rabbit holes and the like. Still, I find it a great way to keep him alive in my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ICaAKuAudQ 