Amazon Will Pay You $5,000 to Quit Your Job

Re:Amazon Will Pay You $5,000 to Quit Your Job by vidarh on Friday April 11, 2014 @10:35AM (#7573063)

Your mind almost certainly works like that whether you like it or not, unless you're a substantial outlier. There's tons of research that attacks this effect from various angles, and pretty consistently it finds that we have an exceedingly strong drive towards consistency between thoughts and emotions and actual physical behaviour.

Of course this is not an absolute: It will not work on everyone all the time. But that is not the point.

There's a multitude of effects that conspire to make us easy to manipulate in this way. I'd recommend Ciadini's book "Influence" as a good introduction to this topic - it's popularised, but full of references to the actual studies, and covers a long range of effects.

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Re:Amazon Will Pay You $5,000 to Quit Your Job by disputin on Friday April 11, 2014 @11:36AM (#7573495)

I'm aware of cognitive biases, and know they get me, I just find this use really feeble. Individuals and all that. When I make bad decisions I don't reconcile anything, I swear and grumble and cut my losses and tell myself to forget about it and move on, and sooner or later I usually do forget about it. New day, new situation, new factors, new decisions. New opportunities to make new bad decisions! I'll take a look at that book, thanks.

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Re:Amazon Will Pay You $5,000 to Quit Your Job by azernik on Friday April 11, 2014 @01:00PM (#7574071)

In very obvious cases, yes, people act like you've described. What this effect manipulates is the judgment of whether something was a bad decision in the first place. People can get disgruntled at a job that is objectively quite good, and can convince themselves that they're satisfied with a situation that's actually not that great.

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