Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions (#326)
Show notes
A daycare started fining parents for picking up their children late. Instead of arriving on time, parents started arriving even later.
Why would a punishment encourage the very behavior it was meant to stop?
Stephen Dubner, bestselling co-author of Freakonomics and longtime host of Freakonomics Radio, has spent more than 20 years uncovering the hidden forces behind human behavior. What he's discovered challenges some of our most deeply held assumptions about why people do what they do.
In this conversation, discover:
- Why punishing bad behavior can actually encourage more of it
- Why rewarding students for perfect attendance can make them show up less
- The shocking discovery about teachers who secretly changed their students' test answers
- What drug dealers living with their mothers reveal about how the world really works
- Why Stephen Dubner thinks we're asking the wrong question about AI
- What he believes we'll look back on in 20 years and wonder how we ever accepted
- The surprising lesson about parenting that changed his own life
What if some of our biggest mistakes come not from failing to think, but from being too sure we already know the answers?