There Is More To Human Motivation Than Profit-Maximization

In 2002, the Nobel Foundation awarded its prize in economics to a guy who wasn’t even an economist. And they gave him the field’s highest honor largely for revealing that we weren’t always rational calculators of our economic self-interest and that the parties often didn’t bargain to a wealth-maximizing result. Daniel Kahneman, an American psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics that year for work he’d done with Israeli Amos Tversky, helped force a change in how we think about what we do. And one of the implications of this new way of thinking is that it calls into question many of the assumptions of Motivation 2.0. Kahneman and others in the field of behavioral economics agreed with my professor that economics was the study of human economic behavior. They just believed that we'd placed too much emphasis on the economic and not enough on the human. That hyperrational calculator-brained person wasn't real. He was a convenient fiction.

~ Daniel H. Pink