Taking their cue from economists, managers and policy makers have come to rely on the use of clever incentives to get people to do the right thing. Barry Schwartz will argue that incentives can never be clever enough to get us what we want and need from doctors, lawyers, teachers, and bankers; that people have to want to do the right thing because it is the right thing. Moreover, incentives can actually make things worse. They can compete with other motives, thereby undermining people’s desire to do the right thing in the absence of incentives. In a society in which everything we do is governed by incentives, people can lose any sense of moral or social obligation. That is, when we allow incentives to dominate our social institutions, we can create a world in which incentives are all there is. In a world like this, nothing works as it should.
Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason: Why Incentives Are No Substitute for Character
Barry Schwartz, psychology, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, UBC
March 01 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
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Mark Vessey has been invited to the University of Bristol to give the Blackwell-Bristol Lectures 2013 at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition.
Dame Anne Salmond will give three talks on how different cultures define and communicate ways of being.
May 07, 2013The Global Civic Policy Society presents a Public Salon on Wednesday, June 5 from 7:30-9pm at the Vancouver Playhouse. A diverse range of speakers from very different walks of life will each spend 7 minutes speaking about something they are passionate about.- May 01, 2013Applicant Paul Yachnin (McGill University) and fifteen co-applicants including Green College Principal Mark Vessey received funding to begin their multi-disciplinary project entitled "Forms of conversion: religion, culture, and cognitive ecologies in early modern Europe and its worlds."
- April 26, 2013Green College resident Brittany Welsh describes how the daunting task of mounting four shows of Shakespeare's The Tempest helped and inspired her and her colleagues in ways she hadn't envisioned when she started down the Bard's path five months earlier.
January 04, 2013Seven Green College students volunteered at Lord Strathcona Elementary School in East Vancouver as part of UBC’s Community Learning Initiative TREK program, matching groups UBC students with elementary schools in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, and helping with reading and writing lessons and tutoring students on a one-on-one basis.
