Social Incentives In Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics

The main argument in chapter one of Freakonomics written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is that incentives have a large influence on human behavior. As the author explains, an incentive is “ a means of urging people to do more of a good thing or less of a bad thing” (17). The book further explains that there are three types of incentives- social incentives by which people’s actions are related to shame and glory; economic incentives which causes people to react toward their financial interest; and moral incentives in which one acts based upon what the right thing to do is. As you continue to read, you learn about three different case studies that all involve the effects of incentives. The first case is about public school teachers in Chicago and the algorithm that proved teachers guilty of cheating on standardized tests by substituting the answers on the student’s answer keys.

The two pieces of evidence that were most convincing came from the case about public school teachers. The first piece of evidence was the data analysis on Chicago school teachers cheating. The data showed that there was “teachers cheating in more than two hundred classrooms per year, roughly 5 percent of the total” (32). This is convincing because the author presented cheating algorithms that showed examples of how you could tell which teachers had cheated and which did not. The least convincing piece of evidence is the study that was done in North Carolina. The study concluded that, “some 35 percent of the respondents said they had witnessed their colleagues cheating in some fashion, whether by giving students extra time, suggesting answers, or manually changing their students’ answers” (32). This piece of evidence is invalid due to the fact that the study is basing all the data off of people’s words and there is no concrete evidence to back up what the participants had