Think Like A Freak: The Authors Of Freakonomics Offer To Retrain Your Brain (Summary): Summary and Analysis by Summary Station

Author:Summary Station
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2014-05-25T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 6

This chapter is all about incentives. Incentives are the rewards that people get from doing something and in most cases incentives are the lead motivators behind people’s daily actions. It is quite clear that people respond strongly to incentives so they are utilized in many ways all over the world.

One of the authors uses a toilet training experience he had with his child as an example to better explain how people respond to incentives. The author and his wife were having a difficult time getting their child to use the toilet. The author told his child that he would give her some candy if she used the toilet and this was effective.

The candy was the incentive in this case and the child continued to use the toilet for a few days in order to get more candy. Everything seemed to be going good and then the child started to use the toilet as much as humanly possible in order to get extra candy. This story goes to show that incentive work well to motivate people to do things, but people usually find a way to cheat the system and get more incentives.

This is a huge problem, but there are ways to prevent it from happening. The most important thing to do in any situation is to get a decent understanding in regards to the incentives of everyone involved. This will help to ensure that problems do not arise in the future and it is one of the qualities involved with thinking like a freak.

There are many different types of incentives. One of the most common and powerful incentives are financial incentives. Financial incentives are any type of monetary gain involved with an action.

The book demonstrates the concept of financial incentives with an example. In America there is a huge obesity epidemic. The problem of obesity has been gradually getting worse across the country and this can be attributed to the rising cost of healthy food and the decreasing cost of junk food. Today, it cost about ten times as much money to eat a healthy diet as it does to eat a junk food diet.

Employment is also used as an example because it is a relevant occurrence in the world today. Most people go to a job everyday and they are paid a wage for their work. Many people claim to enjoy their jobs, but these same people would not be likely to return to work if they were only paid one dollar per hour.

Many of the other types of incentives are not as easy to recognize as financial incentives are. Even if you were to ask a person what their incentives were in any particular situation, it would be likely that they either don’t consciously know or they won’t tell you. This helps to explain why something called the herd mentality is a strong incentive.

Many times people do things just because other people are doing them. For the most part, people do not want to stick out from the crowd or draw too much attention.

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