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keep smoking or eating the wrong things even when they are faced with the prospect of death.

    As you can see, making assumptions about how people react to incentives is pretty risky. We assume that people respond in predictable, knee-jerk ways to incentives like money, but they don’t. Sometimes incentives work in the short term but not in the long run. And sometimes they make people behave in the opposite way you would expect them to. Higher incentives don’t necessarily lead to better performance.
    Here is the truth: if you want people to do something, you really need to understand what motivates them. That is the key: once you understand what people value, then you can use incentives to work in predictable ways, and you can get people (including yourself) to behave in ways that you want them to.
    As economists, it’s our job to look under the hood. We have to learn what can happen in different scenarios. And we must try to understand, as best we can, which incentives work, which ones don’t, and why, so that individuals, businesses, and governments can achieve their goals.
    In the next two chapters, we’ll look into how deeply held cultural worldviews might play into the age-old question of why women continue to earn less than men.

           CHAPTER TWO
            What Can Craigslist, Mazes, and a Ball and Bucket Teach Us About Why Women Earn Less Than Men?
               On the Plains Below Kilimanjaro
    In January 2005, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, offered a lunchtime address to participants at the Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce. Introducing his talk as an “attempt at provocation,” he proceeded to lob a heavy grenade into the ancient war of the sexes. Specifically, he wondered aloud whether an innate, gender-related difference in aptitude between men and women was the culprit behind the huge gender disparity observed among hard-core scientists.
    Citing research showing that women make up just 20 percent of US professors in science and engineering, Summers questioned whether, “in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude,and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.” In other words, he wondered whether women might be at an inherent intellectual disadvantage when it comes to getting to the top in the hard sciences. 1
    The reaction against Summers’s comment was swift, huge, and harsh. A top biologist from MIT, Nancy Hopkins, exited the room in a huff. “For him to say that ‘aptitude’ is the second most important reason that women don’t get to the top when he leads an institution that is 50 percent women students—that’s profoundly disturbing to me,” Hopkins told reporters. “He shouldn’t admit women to Harvard if he’s going to announce when they come that, hey, we don’t feel that you can make it to the top.” 2 The local and national media went wild, and a campaign quickly ensued to fire Summers. The following year, he resigned his post at Harvard—partly because of the reactions to his comments at the conference.
    Summers’s comments—viewed as sexist at worst, tone-deaf at best, and utterly politically incorrect (and he apologized for them several times)—at least did fit with eons of tradition. For millennia, culture and science have colluded to explain why women aren’t as competitive and ambitious as men. In the book of Genesis, Adam’s role was to be Eve’s master. In ancient Rome, women were citizens, but they could not vote or hold public office. Many religions, laws, and cultures around the world persist in subjugating women and forbidding them from competing in a “man’s world.”
    Summers’s comments also bore the stamp of Charles Darwin, who more than 150 years ago proposed that successful males evolved to win