Sublime

‘tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation’.

System 2 is also credited with the continuous monitoring of your own behavior—the control that keeps you polite when you are angry, and alert when you are driving at night. System 2 is mobilized to increased effort when it detects an error about to be made.

Moral standards are forged in part by what parents say after children do the right thing.

Did the results surprise you? Very probably. Most of us think of ourselves as decent people who would rush to help in such a situation, and we expect other decent people to do the same. The point of the experiment, of course, was to show that this expectation is wrong. Even normal, decent people do not rush to help when they expect others to take o

“We are going to take things from each other if we have a chance . . . many people need controls around them for them to do the right thing.”

A fascinating example is the divide around emotional intelligence.38 On one extreme is Daniel Goleman, who popularized the concept.

The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions.

Exploitative, selfish, coercive behavior unravels the fabric of strong groups. Groups know this and also have histories with individuals who abuse power and act in greedy and impulsive ways. So groups choose to give power to people who are enthusiastic, kind, focused, calm, and open.