The Undoing Project

When measuring how intervention methods affect performance, we tend to see an improvement when we punish and a drop when we praise. However, this is oftentimes due to regression to the mean, meaning people will return to their average performance regardless of how we act.

We tend to reward those to do well, and punish them when they do badly. it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others, and rewarded for punishing them.

Kurt Lewin: rather than selling somebody on some change, you’re better off identifying the factors that make a person resistant to the change and addressing those.

Education is knowing what to do when you don’t know.

This is what happens when people become too attached to a theory—they fit the evidence to the theory instead of the theory to the evidence.

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has said.