Incentives

I met this long-haired middle-aged man, Dave, at a pub in Ann Arbor a few months ago. He kept telling me I was such a nice person. I told him I thought everyone acted selfishly, and that even if I were nice outwardly, it was probably because I wanted to acquire friends, or I wanted to be perceived a certain way, or just that it was pragmatic to network in grad school. Then he tried to make me guess his former profession. He was inebriated to be sure, and used the word "dude" so many times I guessed he had been a hippie of the Big Lebowski type but he insisted that because he used to be a detective, he could tell these things about people. Whether I would admit it or not, I was, deep down, a good and nice person. He said, "Sarah, I'm telling you, if someone wanted to hurt you right now, they'd have to go through me." And that was his proof that I was a nice person.

Why the flashback? I just finished watching Freakonomics, the movie based on the book by the same name by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. There's a segment called "Can you bribe a 9th grader to succeed?" where University of Chicago did a study at a public high school. They paid kids $50 every month if they kept their grades at a C or better. Compelling offer, but still the numbers of kids who improved were simply not as high as the U. of Chicago folks were expecting. It reminds me of the book Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. Kohn says giving people rewards, like a bag of M&M's to a child after they pee in the potty instead of in their pants (what Levitt calls controlling incentives when he does it to his own daughter), gets immediate results but actually hurts them in the long run because it destroys intrinsic motivation. Levitt believes we all act according to incentives and doesn't seem to have a problem messing with those incentives to influence people's behavior.

I'm with Levitt. I believe everyone has an angle. It may not necessarily make a person evil and manipulative, but it will drive their actions. Even if a person spends every Saturday serving refried beans to homeless people, it's impossible for them to not have some personal benefit from it--whether it looks good on a resume, impresses a significant other, or even just induces a warm fuzzy feeling, it's still selfish on some level. Is this so wrong, though? Dave stumbled over himself to correct me when I said I wasn't really a selfless person deep down, like he thought I was hoping he would do that. But why are we taught to believe that selfishness is a bad thing? Being selfish ensures survival. And by that token it's probably an evolved trait and somewhat "intrinsic" to all of us, as much as Kohn seems to idealize intrinsic motivation as something more pure. It doesn't mean we can't have genuine good feelings for each other. It just means, if we can cultivate an awareness of our own incentives, we can break down somewhat scientifically why we are drawn to certain careers or locations or people. Like a scientist explaining how a flower produces certain pigments to attract bees to perpetuate its own existence, we can begin to explain why bad relationships crash and burn and why good ones are so amazing. This, I think, is kind of cool.