Nava Ashraf
Altruistic Capital and Our Power to Do Good
Intro
A ‘do-gooder’ and optimist at heart, Nava Ashraf knows that humans are intrinsically motivated by serving one another, and her research seeks to prove it. A Canadian economist, researcher, and professor, Ashraf has spent almost two decades travelling the world, studying what incentives people to do their best at their work. Her research has opposed humanity’s black-and-white thinking about selfish people and altruistic people. Instead, she has proposed that all workers are motivated both by money and impact. Ashraf’s life has been dedicated to harnessing both financial and social incentives to discover ways that workplaces can motivate their employees.
I think we’ve deeply underestimated the desire of individuals to serve others.2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
