Strategies to Motivate for the Collective Good: Erez Yoeli

In this episode of The Decision Corner, Brooke Struck invites Erez Yoeli to share his insights on how people tick. Dr. Erez Yoeli is a research associate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and co-director of the Applied Cooperation Team (ACT). ACT is a team of researchers that applies insights from the social sciences towards increasing contributions to real-world public goods.

Erez designs and tests large-scale interventions to promote altruistic behaviors such as charitable donations, volunteering, resource conservation, and medication adherence. He has worked as a researcher at Harvard University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and Yale University’s Human Cooperation Laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. In this episode, we discuss:

• What motivates people to do the right thing
• How group behavior works
• The difference between reputation and identity
• High and low tech solutions to problems of collective action
• The importance of speaking to communities in their own language (sometimes literally)
• What sets our current pandemic response apart from those of the past
• The unique power of social norms
• The meaning of community, and its unique role in mediating motivation