The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 41 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ariely: Token female leadership appointments make female employees feel worse
“We found that some companies, when they assign women to high positions, The women within these companies feel worse. Why? Because they take it as an indication that the company doesn't really care about them, that they're only doing things to appeal to PR, lik…”
Ariely: Compensation fairness drives performance much more than absolute pay levels
“We found that overall level of compensation doesn't matter so much. Fairness, perception of fairness in compensation matters a lot.”
Ariely: Disparity in appreciation between management and rank-and-file hurts stock performance
“One of the things we find is that it's not about just the overall level of, let's say, feeling appreciated. So we find that feeling appreciated is a very good signal. But it's not just the overall level of being appreciated. It's the difference between how man…”
Ariely: The SHE Index systematically underperforms the S&P 500
“Yeah, so it does much worse. Systematically, repeatedly, by big gap.”
Ariely: Low gender sentiment gap delivers 5% annual alpha over S&P
“When we look at our data, and we ask the question of, what is the gap? We said a lot of things are about relativity. So we said, for each company, let's calculate the gap between how men feel and how women feel. Like, you know, do you feel appreciated? What's …”
Ariely: Treating employees well generates 6% annual alpha
“And we find, if you look at our results, we have, like, six percent a year of alpha of treating your employees well does better.”
Ariely: Increasing pain intensity worsens memory far more than extending duration
“I found out that if you have a period of pain, and you make it longer, you don't actually remember it as worse, but if you change the amplitude, the intensity, you can make it much worse, and the nurses were doing the wrong thing. They were trying to minimize …”
Ariely: Human capital factors almost universally outperform the S&P 500 in backtests
“It turns out that all of those strategies but one, all of these building blocks at one, beats the S&P on that time period, and the one that does worse is like tiny bit worse. Not all of them do as well as others. It's a You know, there's a range, but one from …”
Ariely: A $30 cash bonus cost Intel 5% to 6% in worker productivity
“In the money condition, it went up by about six percent on the first day, went down by 12% the next day. It actually backfired and went slightly up toward the control condition on the next two days, not catching up, though, to the control condition. And in gen…”
Ariely: Widening gap between leadership and employee sentiment signals shorting opportunity
“I will tell you that we find that in every company, when the gap between how Leadership feels about the company and how the rank and file employees feel about the company. As this gap grows, it's a good sign to short the stock.”
Ariely: Adding unstructured job interviews makes candidate hiring predictions worse
“Job interviews are notoriously terrible. You take somebody and you get their GPA, GRE, whatever, and then you add an interview, your prediction is worse. If it's a non-structured interview.”
Ariely: Uneven employee complaints signal worse performance than uniform dissatisfaction
“And if you find that people are complaining equally at management and at the level of the employee, this is not as a bad signal as if management is not complaining and employees are complaining much more.”
Ariely: ESG drives profitability primarily through employee motivation
“I think that the real pathway is For ESG, goes through employee motivation. If you think about it, the moment you are doing some version of ESG, presumably your employees are more on board. They feel that the company has better goals, the company is more conne…”
Ariely: HR should operate as an R&D function, not legal compliance
“HR in most company is a procedural process. Legal function. They do the sexual misconduct and the module. They worry about procedural things. I think that HR needs to be an R&D function. They need to continuously try different things and improve how the compan…”
Ariely: Activist investors trying to reform corporate culture misunderstand it
“And I think that a lot of investors, a lot of activist investor look at companies where they don't like the culture and they say, let me buy that company and influence the culture. But I don't think they systematically understand the culture.”
Ariely: High-appreciation firms gained 15% in early COVID versus 5% market average
“The companies in general, if I remember correctly, between March and October, the stock market lost a lot and then gained a lot, and it was about five percent net overall. The companies that I'll tell you now about went up by 15%. That's a big gap, and those c…”
Ariely: Employee health and financial benefits only boosted performance during COVID-19
“So before COVID, we found that employee benefits didn't make a big difference. Financial benefits, health benefits didn't matter. During COVID, there was actually a positive effect of these benefits, and I think it's because period when people are more worried…”
Ariely: JPMorgan found his human capital data uncorrelated with ESG
“And the team at JP Morgan did a really nice analysis of our data. They were unbelievably thorough. I was deeply impressed by these guys, and it came basically with very good analysis and result, and it's kind of nice to have somebody like a third It's a little…”
Ariely: A gender-focused index underperforms a pure human capital index
“The real index was designed to maximize return from the beginning with no other constraint. The gender index was taking the best we had, but limiting it to companies who do well on, on gender. So it does not as well. Maybe we have something like slightly more …”
Ariely: Physical tracking coin doubled savings in Kibera study over 20% match
“And it turns out that the coin almost doubled savings compared to everything else, including 20% match.”
Ariely: People under-save because modern savings and insurance are socially invisible
“Every time we save or buy insurance, we don't get any positive reinforcement. Not from ourselves and not from the people around us. So think about the time when people used to save in goats, right? If you saved in livestock, you could come home from the office…”
Ariely: HR is the least reputable and most bureaucratic corporate department
“HR, I think, is maybe the worst, least reputable department in almost every company. Maybe compliance is worse, but you know, it's a hierarchy of the company. HR, rather than
Being considered the R&D arm of the company is considered a bureaucracy that people d…”
Ariely: Employee benefits are a lagging indicator, not a predictor of performance
“So for example, the dimension of benefits, that one changes much more as a result of how companies do financially rather as a lead indicator. And actually in our data, we don't see much of an effect for that.”
Ariely: Lemonade eliminates insurance conflicts by donating residual claims pools to charity
“So we decided to create an insurance company that takes a fixed amount of profit. When people sign up, they sign up around the charity. So let's say there's a thousand people that sign up around the World Wildlife Fund. They sign up around the World Wildlife F…”
Ariely: Directly asking employees beats proxy metrics like sick days
“And when we don't look at what's happening inside people's brains, and we look at other things instead, we're giving up a lot. So for example, think about something like sick days. Sick days is obviously a really good indication of how excited people are about…”
Ariely: Third-party surveys yield better employee data than internal collection
“When we ask people with these data providers, it is very important that the data is being collected by a third party. You know, if the company is trying to collect the data directly from employees, there's always a risk that people are trying to create some im…”
Ariely: Fairness and workplace pay are primarily driven by relativity
“Relative pay is more important. Relative fairness is more important. Fairness is all about relativity.”
Ariely: The importance of inclusive innovation increased during COVID
“We found one of the things that changed during COVID is what we call inclusive innovation has increased in its importance.”
Ariely: Employees adapt to office perks, but appreciation yields lasting motivation
“If you think about things like better coffee, better tables, better chairs compared to feeling appreciated, There's just no comparison, and the thing that happens there is if you get better coffee, and I'm a big fan of coffee, so I love good coffee, if you get…”
Ariely: The positive performance impact of employee benefits will fade post-COVID
“Now, I think that will go away, but it was interesting to see how this timing did change a little bit the mix of what was important.”
Ariely: Sector-specific human capital models are no better than universal models
“So we didn't do this research during COVID, but we did, of course, in the pre-COVID data, right, from 2006 and on, and we found no difference. When you do kind of statistical modeling, there's what's called nested models. So you could say, let me create a mode…”
Ariely: Human motivation factors drive impact across all industries, not just tech
“There are big differences about people care, and we can all imagine how people who care at Google are going to create a bigger impact, but no, people who care, it would manifest everywhere. So the things that we're capturing are Feeling appreciated. Feeling th…”
Ariely: Remote work dramatically elevates intrinsic over extrinsic motivation
“You put employees at home, All of a sudden, the role of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation changes dramatically.”
Ariely: Human capital sentiment data has an 18-month half-life
“So in general, what we find is that this data has a half lifetime of about 18 months.”
Ariely: Higher National Violence Correlates With More COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories
“There's a new research that shows that looks at 67 countries and show that the more violence there is in the country, the more they have conspiracy theories about COVID 19.”
Ariely: The intra-empathy gap causes major mistakes in judging motivation
“This question, by the way, is about how difficult it is for us to estimate emotional states of things we don't experience, and it's also connected to our discussion here today, because, you know, when you are setting up a motivation for your employees, you're …”
Ariely: Soweto residents sometimes spend up to two years of income on funerals
“People in Soweto spend up to two years sometimes of income on funerals.”
Ariely: Expensive painkillers relieve more pain than identical cheap ones
“So in one study, we checked what happens when we give people expensive medications and cheap medication, and we show that the expensive medication create higher belief, and therefore they're also more effective. So we gave people electrical shocks, and we saw …”
Ariely: Cash compensation settles past obligations while gifts build future relationships
“If I pay you, What is the time horizon of payment? The time horizon usually you've done something for me and I'm paying you back. The books are closed, right? It's backward looking. It's not, I'm paying you and now you owe me. It's like you did something, I'm …”
Ariely: Discretionary effort gap in the knowledge economy will continue widening
“Everybody in the knowledge economy has a large range, and that range is only going to increase.”
Ariely: Companies cannot contract discretionary effort or employee imagination
“Companies can contract on the minimum amount of work you need to do, but nobody can contract on how much energy you're really putting toward work, how imaginative you're trying to be, how much you're reading extra, thinking hard, and so on.”