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Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions By Dan Ariely ( HarperCollins )
Release Date: 2008-02-19
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List Price: $25.95
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 My Favorite Book
This is by far my favorite book hands down. There are some bad reviews on here saying that Ariely's experiments are inaccurate, but regardless, it was still very entertaining to read. I definitely recommend this book!
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Irrationality laid bare
Very readable and after reading it is common sense but what a complicted world we live in. And, we made it so. Thank you Prof Ariely.
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Practical application for a sales guy... ( jack_conway_jr )
This book is recommended reading for anyone that is in sales (and aren't we all in some manner). This reviewer sells enterprise SaaS applications/outsourcing to large companies and this book is instantly applicable in my career.
Chapter 1 is worth the price of the book itself! Relativity is key...how many of us non-academics that have to present business cases or influence people for a living have seen the "analysis paralysis" invade our propspective decision making committees? How many times have you assumed your audience will take the information you are presenting and act on it rationally...this book has helped this reviewer to see that it is simply not the case. Futhermore, the author helps with framing decision scenarios...think of it as a blueprint to work from.
It's also refreshing to read a non-academic book with ideas on human behavior that are:
- written by someone with very high credibility
- based on evidence
- not found in the "sales help" section of my local bookstore (thank you Amazon recommendations) where the premise of decision making is flawed from the outset.
I don't get some of the criticism about left leaning ideas in this book...it's certainly not a theme of his to promote bigger government. Rather, to the author's credit, the one comment I do recall on health care pricing is a hypothesis that he can support with some evidence...even if you don't agree with him it's an interesting thought experiment.
There's so much more to take away from this book that can be applicable to one's life...that's not an exaggeration as Chapter 8 (Keeping Doors Open) was profound...I enjoyed this book from beginning to end.
One last comment...the chapters on dishonesty are fascinating!
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 Who Decides "Better"? ( nyghtewynd )
Ariely is a good writer whose book catches onto the _Freakonomics_ craze by taking a look at times when people make different decisions that typical "laissez faire" economic theories would expect. His book is a fairly easy read and does include some surprising results through social-science experimentation.
However, the text is not without its flaws. For instance, some of the breathlessly-reported "surprising" results aren't all that surprising or even controversial. For instance, the effect of a "free" item on consumer decision-making is vastly overstated as irrational. This idea is old-hat to most and doesn't make much of a point. More troubling, however, is the unstated difference between this brand of social science and pure economics, and the author states such at the end of the text: the ultimate goal of such discovery is to alter and market certain things that are "beneficial" to most people into "free lunches" which are irresistable to the average Joe.
Here is where pure economics gets it right: there is no such thing as a "free lunch", no matter what social economics claims. The buck always stops somewhere. If people are going to make "better" decisions about things, someone somewhere is going to decide what "better" is. And if someone else is deciding the terms of this "better", it no longer falls on the individual to do so.
It is true that human beings cannot always be protected from themselves. If this is true, then this is tenfold true for random human beings (usually via government nannyism) who force "better" upon all people, rational or otherwise. Ariely never tries to face this dilemna, and it weakens the conclusion of the book considerably. This is an entertaining read, and worth your time as a second or third go at _Freakonomics_-like thought, but it doesn't hold a candle to the original.
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The title Could Apply to Certain Economists ( noone5445 )
For some time now, economists have been talking about rational people and rational behavior. The more they've talked, the more puzzled the rest of us have become, because what they talk about often has no visible relationship to anything that exists in reality. "Rational behavior" is sometimes among the most far-fetched imaginable. This book offers an example on page 64:
"The rational consumer would estimate the amount of pleasure he expects to get from the Hershey's Kiss (let's say this is five pleasure units) and subtract the displeasure he would get from paying one cent (let's say this is one displeasure unit)."
Now I've never in my life tried to calculate numerical pleasure units for a Hershey's Kiss or anything else. Nor has anyone else I know, and I'm willing to bet you haven't either. That no one would want to suck the joy out of a piece of candy in that manner is common sense. To economists, however, measuring the pleasure units of a chocolate is all in a day's work.
Dan Ariely is one economist who is catching up to what the rest of the world already knows. "Predictably Irrational" is about his experiments in economics, all of which prove that ordinary people don't do what economists want them to do. I won't argue with the experiments. Most of them look sound, though there are flaws in a couple. The big problem here is not what Ariely got wrong, but what he got right. As a whole, the book demonstrates less how out of it people are and more how out of touch economists are.
For instance, there's a chapter on "The Cost of Social Norms". Ariely concludes that people behave differently under social norms than under market norms. In other words, we'll help out friends and family happily and freely. Once money is involved, however, we'll want decent pay. This, one would imagine, is obvious. Lesser minds than Ariely's would have sufficed to discover it.
What really threw me was the discussion at the end of the chapter. Ariely describes his experience at Burning Man, a festival where people exchange what they need without cash. Ariely remarks that it was a pleasant, low-stress experience. He says, "Could there be some aspects of our life that would be, in some ways, better without money? That's a radical idea, and not an easy way to imagine."
Now, here's the rub. I can imagine it easily. So could most other people. Of course the invasion of money into our private lives has made things less pleasant. Of course we'd be happier if we did more things on a friend-to-friend basis. Of course life would be better if we worried about our finances less. I'd reckon that every sensible person thinks so. The idea is not "radical". It's one of the most mainstream ideas around.
Ariely frequently designs experiments to prove things that are already known and makes `radical' new conclusions that are actually quite old. By itself, this might be funny. However, his unawareness of most human thinking also leads to wrong conclusions and bad solutions for the problems mentioned.
For example, he has a chapter called The Influence of Arousal. He concludes that arousal is influential; we make different decisions when turned on--by sex or other things--than when we're `cold'. Again, no surprises there. Ariely acknowledges that this has been known for a while. He references Stevenson's classis "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", though he could as easily have quoted the Apostle Paul. ("My own behavior baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe. Yet surely if I do things that I really don't want to do, it cannot be said that I am doing them at all,--it must be sin that has made its home in my nature." [Rom 7:16-7])
What Ariely doesn't seem to know is that the human race has techniques for grappling with these problems. His solutions are mechanical. Cars should measure and respond to the driver's emotional state. Credit cards should impose limits on how much we can spend. Yet these fixes might well create problems of their own. Why not instead return to the wisdom that civilization is based on? Many people have successfully conquered their reptilian selves and achieved a greater unity, not only in our society but all over the world. It takes effort, of course, so a technological quick fix sounds appealing, but we need something that's proven to work.
Ariely's problem is most acute in two chapters on honesty at end. He proves that many people are dishonest (surprise!) and also looks at honesty in different circumstances. For instance, he finds less cheating when people deal with cash than with other forms of money. This may be interesting, but again his solutions again are small and unlikely to work. He mentions ethics classis in college and graduate programs. Morality, however, starts in grade school, not grad school. Raising an honest person is a lifelong effort. Our society's falling ethical standards cannot be fixed with a band-aid.
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Addiction
