Elliot Aronson

And this one feels backwards, which is exactly why it works and why most financial advisors will never do it.

There is a classic study from 1966, Elliot Aronson and his colleagues, where people listened to recordings of a supposedly brilliant quiz contestant.

And I talked about this in one of the most recent episodes, actually.

In one version, at the end, the contestant clumsily spilled coffee all over himself.

If your ego allows you to suspect this trap, convince someone to be radically candid with you.

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson's Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me offers a funny take on this.

You should check it out.

Thanks for listening.

The first book I ever picked up is actually still my favorite book to this day.

It's called The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson.

it's considered by many to be like the Bible for social psychology.

And from Elliot Aronson, it took me to Robert Cialdini and influence and Dale Carnegie and how to win friends and influence people to political psychology, to moral psychology, to evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics.

And ultimately I built this kind of knowledge base about all the different ways that influence how people think and make decisions and make behavior.

And I said, What can I do with this, right? I want to teach people about this.

I think it turns out that a lot of those hard parts that have recently been removed were actually doing something for us, and the science on why is something I am very interested in.

I had a look into what's actually happening in our brains when we remove a lot of the difficulty from our lives, and the first thing I came across is a theory called effort justification, and this is based on research that goes back to a psychologist called Elliot Aronson in the '50s.

The basic finding, which wasn't a surprise to me, is that we value things more when we've had to work for them.

There's a famous later study called the IKEA Effect by Michael Norton at Harvard Business School, which found that people place significantly higher value on flat-pack furniture they'd built themselves, even when it was objectively worse than the preassembled version, just because they'd put the effort in.

There's also something called the jigsaw or teaching technique.

So Elliot Aronson came up with this and he said there's six conditions that must be met to reduce prejudice.

First, in and out groups have to have interdependence.

We talked about that with the Robert's Cave.

So, um, I make jokes about philosophy being kind of, uh, the, the, the job market being anemic for philosophy majors, which is true, but philosophy is actually was a great starting point for me because philosophy was all about, like, musings on human nature, right? These th- theories about, like, what makes humans tick, and so that kind of s- kickstarted my interest in, in psychology in a, in a little less of a formal way.

And when I graduated and I was kinda trying to figure out what I want to do, I started reading about psychology, right? And the first book I picked up was The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson.

Um, and to this day, it remains my favorite book of all time.

Mm.