Category: Business
Events:
Articles:
February 2, 2021
Does Competition Increase Trust?
Research shows that when a person moves into a more competitive industry their trust tends to increase.
April 9, 2020
The Fossil Fuel Industry: The Greatest Threat to Human Wellbeing
Fossil fuel companies have an incentive to prevent policies that would keep them from selling their assets. We should not be surprised, therefore, that these companies have taken steps to prevent such an outcome.
February 27, 2020
The Cultural Evolution of Social Pathologies: Introduction to a Series of Essays by Anthony Biglan
The fact that evolutionary selection pressures so often result in social pathologies might be hard to accept, but once faced squarely it can lead to an optimistic point of view.
June 18, 2018
You're Racist and Sexist, But It’s Not (Entirely) Your Fault
Companies are great at evaluating skills but inconsistent at evaluating temperament due to unconscious bias. These biases are, in part, a natural outcome of the human species evolving in small, homogenous groups. But new tools can help us overcome our innate biases to achieve cultural change.
April 4, 2018
Design organizations compatible with human nature
From the advent of the industrial revolution to the present, the business class paid scant attention to human nature. The social and physical design of organizations focused on efficiency and cost-savings. This resulted in a mismatch between our work environments and human nature.
April 4, 2018
The Evolved Decision Maker
What behavioural economists neglected to answer is the ultimate question: why do people possess these psychological dispositions? Answering ultimate questions leads one to evolution, as the human brain has been honed by the forces of natural selection.
April 3, 2018
Tinbergen’s four questions and variance explained: Why business (and all behavioral science) needs evolutionary theory
Any behavioral science—including business—that does not acknowledge, understand, and utilize Tinbergen’s four evolutionary questions to guide research will simply be leaving variance left to be explained on the table, and will be fundamentally limited as a result.
October 12, 2016
Memo To Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists
‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of Amazon's working environment, sink or swim. But Amazon is not alone. Can evolutionary biology shed some light on why competition in the workplace does not alway produce the best outcomes?
January 3, 2016
Doing Well By Doing Good: A Report on Socially Responsible Businesses
Can businesses do well by doing good? Yes, according to this report headed by EI President David Sloan Wilson. The report provides a much needed alternative to the “Greed is Good” philosophy of orthodox economic theory, which has dominated the curriculum of business schools for over 50 years.
October 8, 2013
Darwin’s Business Conference At NYU Stern
New evolutionary thinking about cooperation, groups, firms and societies.To explore the new implications of this vastly improved evolutionary theory for business, we recently organized a one-day symposium at Stern titled “Darwin’s Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms and Societies.”
October 7, 2013
Tribal Social Instincts, Gene-culture Co-evolution, And Business
Organizational management is about shaping the norms and institutions of quasi-tribal groups so that they work better. Pete Richerson argues that much of what organizational management amounts to is trying to shape the norms and institutions of quasi-tribal groups so that they work better.
October 7, 2013
Punctuated Equilibria And The Evolution of Norms
Theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living.My theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules.
October 7, 2013
Corporate Honesty: A Behavioral And Evolutionary Model, With Policy Implications
Neoclassical economic theory has dominated business school thinking and is based on an incorrect model of human behaviorSince the mid-1970's neoclassical economic theory has dominated business school thinking and teaching, based on an incorrect Homo economicus model of human behavior. Moreover, the neoclassical efficient markets hypothesis implies that a firm's stock price is the best overall measure of the firm's long-term value, so managerial incentives should be tied closely to stock market performance.
October 7, 2013
What Might Darwin Have Said About Private Contracts That Limit Competition?
When unbridled competition is clearly inefficient and how more competition is not always a good thing.I explains how private contracts and limited competition have been treated as presumptively illegal under the anti-trust laws which implicitly rest on the premise that more competition is always a good thing. Yet in many cases, unbridled competition is clearly inefficient.
October 7, 2013
A Third Wave Of Evolutionary Thought
How evolution experienced a case of arrested development in relation to human affairs.I explain how evolutionary thought has developed more or less continuously in the life sciences since Darwin, but experienced a case of arrested development in relation to human affairs. A renewed effort to rethink the human-related academic disciplines began in the late 20th century, comprising a second wave of evolutionary thought.
October 7, 2013
Trait-signaling Instincts Can Drive Conspicuous Consumption—But That It Not The Only Option
Social competition and sexual selection have shaped human instincts for showing off our mental traits.Social competition and sexual selection have shaped human instincts for showing off our mental traits (e.g. intelligence. personality traits, moral virtues) to mates, rivals, friends, peers, and other groups. In modern capitalism, such trait-display instincts are channeled mostly into educational credentialism, workaholic careerism, and runaway consumerism, with often harmful effects on environments, societies, families, and fertility patterns.
October 7, 2013
The Empathy Problem
The implications that the empathy problem has for ethical behavior within firms.I address the implications that the empathy problem has for ethical behavior within firms, particularly engendering sufficient trust to facilitate the use of modern institutional mechanisms that, in turn, affect firm, industry, and social evolution.
October 7, 2013
Working With Human Nature To Improve Business Ethics
Why our moral psychology makes it difficult to teach ethics.I give a brief overview of an evolutionary approach to moral psychology in which people are mostly concerned about appearances and reputation, rather than actually doing the right thing. I explain why this complex psychology makes it difficult to teach ethics to anyone. Yet an understanding of the origins and mechanisms of moral cognition open the way for us to do (and teach) “<a href="http://www.ethicalsystems.org/">ethical systems design</a>,” a way of working with human nature and setting up environments that lead to better ethical behavior.
October 7, 2013
The Cultural Equivalent Of Sex: How Exchange Accelerates Cultural Evolution
Lack of exchange explains why culture evolves more slowlyIt is now well established that cultural evolution is a fundamentally Darwinian process, exhibiting incremental descent with modification, semi-random innovation (trial and error), competition among ideas, selective survival and other Darwinian features. One key ingredient of Darwinian evolution is genetic recombination, usually through sexual reproduction, which makes evolution a cumulative phenomenon.
October 7, 2013
A More Natural Workplace
The effects of the presence of a companion animal on behavior and attitudes in the workplace.My talk is about two studies that deal with “mismatch.” The basic idea behind mismatch theory is that aspects of the modern environment are incongruent (mismatched) with our psychology and physiology, which are more adapted to the environment in which we evolved—the savannas of East Africa.
September 23, 2013
Hive Psychology At Google
How and why people join fraternities, sports teams, and companies. When I was invited to give an Authors@Google talk in 2012, I thought it made sense to talk about “hive psychology.” Google is a very hivish place – and I mean that in a good way.
September 5, 2013
Welcome To The New Business Section
Why business? What does evolution have to contribute to the study or conduct of business?Welcome to the new business section of This View of Life. My name is Jon Haidt, and I’m a social psychologist and professor of business ethics at the NYU-Stern School of Business.
August 29, 2012
Using Evolution to Understand Apple’s Business Model
Compared to competing companies, they routinely blow everybody else out of the water. How is this the case?
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