Quote · TED Talks Daily
Does working hard really make you a good person? | Azim Shariff (re-release)
Where this was said
Sponsor Break
At 3:13 · chapter starts 1:10
The episode pauses for three sponsor segments. Apple Card promotes its titanium credit card offering unlimited daily cash back, available through the Wallet app on iPhone and issued by Goldman Sachs. Kohler pitches its Veil Smart Toilet — a design-forward fixture with touchscreen controls and customizable features — as the product of 150 years of engineering. Dell targets back-to-school shoppers with the XPS laptop starting at $699 (student pricing from $599), highlighting portability and processing power for multitasking.
People consistently rate harder workers as more moral, even when those workers produce identical results. This isn't a Western quirk: Shariff's research replicates across the US, South Korea, France, and the Hadza people of Tanzania.
When a medical scribe's job is replaced by software, participants judged the Jeff who kept pointlessly working as warmer, more trustworthy, and more moral — even though he produced nothing extra. He also seemed like a bit of a chump.
In Azim Shariff's experiment, participants rated a medical scribe who kept working pointlessly as warmer and more moral than one who stayed home, despite identical output.
