SXSW 2013 Sampler

Introduction: Likeability, Rogue Economists, and the Lovable Fool xxxi
The Psychology of Likeonomics
Dr. Daniel Kahneman was once described by Harvard psychologist
Daniel Gilbert as ‘‘the most distinguished living psychologist in the
world, bar none.’’ Along with partner Amos Tversky, his lifetime of
work in applying psychological principles of how people behave to
economic theory essentially led directly to what we today call the
field of behavioral economics. When they were awarded the Nobel
Prize in 2002, the awarding committee credited Kahneman for ‘‘for
having integrated insights from psychological research into economic
science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making
under uncertainty.’’
The idea that people are not logical robots, but rather that they
respond to incentives and are led by emotions is still a relatively recent
idea.
For a field once called the ‘‘dismal science’’ by the Victorian
historian Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth century, one of its strongest
mainstream boosts for the importance of economics would come in
2005 with the publication of Freakonomics, which also inspired the title
for this book.
The authors of Freakonomics like to use the description ‘‘rogue
economist’’ to describe their take on the world. Part economics and
part social psychology, they merged these worlds together successfully
in a groundbreaking book that explains why we behave the way we
do, why seemingly unrelated phenomena from across the world may
be linked, and how our understanding of what motivates our behaviors
may not be as simple and rational as we like to think.
Since Freakonomics, this theme of the irrationality of behavior is one
that has become extremely popular in multiple best-selling books.
Each book reaches a related conclusion—that people act in emotional,
human, and unexpected ways, and respond to incentives.
We are not logical robots.
Just because we respond to emotional appeals and tend to act in
human ways, however, doesn’t necessarily prove that likeability is all
that important. After all, there seem to be plenty of examples of leaders