How We Decide

(Emotion and motivation share the same Latin root, movere, which means "to move.")

Mischel's results were very surprising, at least to him. There was a strong correlation between the behavior of the four-year-old waiting for a marshmallow and that child's future behavior as a young adult. The children who rang the bell within a minute were much more likely to have behavioral problems later on. They got worse grades and were more

Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.

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For example, when Thaler asked people whether they would drive twenty minutes out of their way to save five dollars on a fifteen-dollar calculator, 68 percent of respondents said yes. However, when he asked people whether they would drive twenty minutes out of their way to save five dollars on a $125 leather jacket, only 29 percent said they would.

Look at poor Frank, a contestant on the Dutch version of Deal or No Deal. He gets off to an unlucky start by immediately eliminating some of the most lucrative briefcases. After six rounds, Frank has only one valuable briefcase left, worth five hundred thousand euros. The Banker offers him #102,006, about 75 percent of a perfectly fair offer. Frank

When it comes to making ethical decisions, human rationality isn't a scientist, it's a lawyer.

Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla

asymmetric paternalism.