Anyways I found this interesting in the context of our musings on the American Dream and maybe the whole "pull yourself up by the boot straps" adage. A great listen, it examines the motivations of quitting for everyone from washed up baseball players to prostitutes.
They mentioned an interesting trick being employed by the company Zappos, in which after having a week of training, they were offered $3,000 dollars to quit. Of the the thousands who the company has trained, only 30 have taken it. Then almost no one quits in the initial months after training because they’d feel like fools to quit for nothing when they could have quit for money. The cognitive dissonance would be too great. This is the power of resisted temptation. This takes advantage of the phenomenon that when we sink a many resources into something, we will be slow to abandon it. We even convince ourselves we must love it, the same that fraternities/sororities, sports teams, and the military do to their new members. I wonder if we could somehow employ this in our efforts to find strategies for gap closure and such.
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