Thinking in Bets

Thinking in Bets

Using Lessons from Quit to Nudge AGAINST Quitting

An interesting proposal about getting kids to stay in college

Annie Duke's avatar
Annie Duke
Feb 25, 2024
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group of fresh graduates students throwing their academic hat in the air
Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash

Cognitive science tells us that when it comes to quitting, people mostly stick to things too long.

But, of course, that is not always true. Especially when it comes to kids who may not be as good at seeing the reward at the end of the hard and challenging road along the way.

Sometimes you need to nudge people to quit sooner. But other times, you might want to nudge people against quitting. And if we understand the risk factors that make people quit things too soon, we might be able to reverse engineer what we know about the factors that cause people to stick to things too long in order to increase persistence in things people ought to actually stick too longer.

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