Scott Jeffrey: On Justifiability

Because we’re taking a little break, we are republishing one of our favorite episodes: a conversation with Scott Jeffrey, PhD from Monmouth University in New Jersey, recorded in December 2017. Our conversation was so engaging that we wanted to make sure no one misses out on it. The original audio from this was only our third podcast we’d ever recorded, and it was a recorded with the simplest tools available. That said, we hope you enjoy the content.

In this episode, we discuss the concept of justifiability with one of its earliest researchers, Scott Jeffrey, PhD. Scott was early among researchers, including Itamar Simonson at Stanford, to note that part of what makes a thing a ‘reward’ is its difficulty to be justifiable. In other words, the best reward is something that we would NOT justify spending our own money on.

Scott took an interesting turn with his theme song and we had also talked about how employee engagement platforms are ‘dollarizing’ the relationship between the employer and the employee. Scott also brought up Max Bazerman’s “Arguing with Yourself and Losing” model which coaxed a spirited discussion among us.

We groove on holiday eats, since we originally recorded this in December and lots of geeky stuff in this episode. We hope you enjoy.