The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg

Author:Sasha Issenberg [Issenberg, Sasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95481-7
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN SHAME PAYS A HOUSE CALL

In 2002, Todd Rogers opened a manila file folder and let a flurry of newspaper and magazine clips settle on the kitchen table of his Western Massachusetts home. Less than two years earlier, the recent Williams College graduate had turned down opportunities to work at bigger Washington polling firms to join Abacus Associates, whose small office was run by two former academics and where Rogers handled junior tasks like data analysis and writing survey questions. But now he was itching to do something new, as was made clear by the fact that he was opening the folder. When Rogers started at Abacus, he had christened the file, and gradually filled it with news articles: every time he found himself intrigued by something outside his intellectual comfort zone, he would stuff it in the folder. As he spread years of clips on his table, he was trusting them to guide him toward a new career. “Eventually it all made sense. It was all about behavioral science experiments,” says Rogers. “Your interests reveal themselves.”

The twenty-four-year-old had experienced revelations like this before. As a teenager living in Philadelphia’s western suburbs, Rogers learned just after Thanksgiving of his junior year of high school that he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He scheduled his trips for chemotherapy around his team’s lacrosse schedule, and every two weeks would check in to the oncology ward of a local children’s hospital. Most of Rogers’s fellow patients were much younger kids, and he kept a distance from them, and from the Happy Meals and video games their presence drew. Rogers further rebelled against the frivolity by proudly refusing to watch television and choosing instead, for the first time in his life, to read for pleasure. The first book he picked was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which led him to other works of American transcendentalism. By the next Thanksgiving, Rogers had beaten cancer, completed his junior year on schedule, played in fourteen of his team’s sixteen games, and developed a new sense of the self. “Even when you are healthy again you don’t feel normal,” says Rogers, who as an adult kept a fit physique and a gleaming shaved head. “You carry some secret differences.”

Now Rogers was driving back to Williams, where he had played Division 3 lacrosse and been elected student body co-president. He met with one of his favorite professors, Al Goethals, whose Introduction to Social Psychology class Rogers realized had fertilized his now-blossoming interests. Goethals had introduced his students to behavioral psychology, the burgeoning subdiscipline that took a pessimistic view of the human brain as a flawed instrument for navigating life’s most challenging decisions. Rogers had voraciously consumed writings by some of the field’s most prominent scholars, including psychologist Robert Cialdini, an expert in the way that consumers were simply unable to make rational choices, and economist Richard Thaler, who explored how that flawed “mental accounting” warped markets involving everything from auctions to savings accounts. As he sat down again with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.