How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

COME ON, BE FAIR
Fairness is a powerful social force. When it’s present, it helps us feel good about
being part of society, makes us willing to contribute and compromise. When it’s
absent, we struggle.
Colin Camerer and Richard Thaler, behavioral economists from Caltech and
the University of Chicago, respectively, have demonstrated the importance we
place on fairness in a well-known experiment called the Ultimatum Game. It
works like this: Imagine you’ve been given $10, and you’re told to offer a

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stranger anything between zero and $10. If the other person accepts whatever
you offer, you both get to keep your respective shares of the money. But if he
rejects your offer, neither of you gets anything. Without social brains, you might
offer the person a few pennies, and he would accept it because it’s better than
nothing. But to human beings with a deep-seated psychological need for
fairness, that feels like a derisory offer. And sure enough, in experiments, most
people reject this highly unequal deal—leaving both sides with no deal and no
money. The deal typically gets done only once offers reach $2.
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This is mirrored in the findings of neuroscientists like UCLA’s Matt
Lieberman and colleagues, who have scanned the brains of volunteers while they
are playing these kinds of social games. Their work shows that fair offers
activated people’s reward systems, while unfair offers required people to engage
their brain’s self-control circuitry to overcome their annoyance and swallow the
unfairness.
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In other words, people’s brains had to divert some precious
deliberate system capacity to staying calm in the face of the injustice. (And
that’s when there’s just $2 at stake.) The bottom line? Ensuring that colleagues
feel that workplace decisions are fair not only keeps their reward systems happy,
but leaves people with more mental energy to focus on other things.
You would never set out to be unfair in your dealings with colleagues, I know.
But I highlight the topic because managers are often on the hook for making
decisions where there are winners and losers. Some people get promoted; others
don’t. Some divisions get more resources; others don’t. And for those on the
losing side, it’s all too easy to see those decisions as unfair.
You can’t avoid the fact that decisions sometimes benefit certain people more
than others. But you can demonstrate that the 
process
behind the decisions is
fair. That means being as transparent as possible about the reasons for your
decisions when you’re navigating difficult waters. Like this:
Explain the factors being weighed, and why they are relevant criteria for the
decision. Show how the options are being assessed against those criteria.
Discuss any dilemmas you face in making the decisions, and how you’re
handling them.
Your colleagues might not like the eventual outcomes of your choices, but
behavioral science suggests that they’ll be far more supportive if they can see
that your decision-making process was fair.

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