• Complain

Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Here you can read online Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, publisher: Harper Perennial, genre: Home and family. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Dan Ariely Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
  • Book:
    Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Harper Perennial
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2010
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

From Publishers Weekly Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money. According to Ariely, our understanding of economics, now based on the assumption of a rational subject, should, in fact, be based on our systematic, unsurprising irrationality. Ariely argues that greater understanding of previously ignored or misunderstood forces (emotions, relativity and social norms) that influence our economic behavior brings a variety of opportunities for reexamining individual motivation and consumer choice, as well as economic and educational policy. Arielys intelligent, exuberant style and thought-provoking arguments make for a fascinating, eye-opening read. *(Feb.)* Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review This is a wonderful, eye-opening book. Deep, readable, and providing refreshing evidence that there are domains and situations in which material incentives work in unexpected ways. We humans are humans, with qualities that can be destroyed by the introduction of economic gains. A must read! (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable ) In creative ways, author Dan Ariely puts rationality to the test. . . . New experiments and optimistic ideas tumble out of him, like water from a fountain. (Boston Globe ) Inventive. . . . An accessible account. . . . Ariely is a more than capable storyteller . . . If only more researchers could write like this, the world would be a better place. (Financial Times ) Sly and lucid. . . . Predictably Irrational is a far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner lets on. (New York Times Book Review ) An entertaining tour of the many ways people act against their best interests, drawing on Arielys own ingeniously designed experiments. . . . Personal and accessible. (BusinessWeek ) A delightfully brilliant guide to our irrationalityand how to overcome itin the marketplace and everyplace. (Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and Dealing with Darwin ) PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL is a scientific but imminently readable and decidedly insightful look into why we do what we do every day...and why, even though we know better, we may never change. (Wenda Harris Millard, President, Media, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia ) Predictably Irrational is an important book. Full of valuable and entertaining insights that will make an impact on your business, professional, and personal life. (Jack M Greenberg, Chairman, Western Union Company, Retired Chairman and CEO, McDonalds Corporation ) Predictably Irrational is clever, playful,humorous, hard hitting, insightful, and consistently fun and exciting to read. (Paul Slovic, Founder and President, Decision Research ) Freakonomics held that people respond to incentives, perhaps in undesirable ways, but always rationally. Dan Ariely shows you how people are deeply irrational, and predictably so. (Chip Heath, Co-Author, Made to Stick, Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business ) A marvelous book that is both thought provoking and highly entertaining, ranging from the power of placebos to the pleasures of Pepsi. Ariely unmasks the subtle but powerful tricks that our minds play on us, and shows us how we can prevent being fooled. (Jerome Groopman, New York Times bestselling author of How Doctors Think ) PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL is a charmer-filled with clever experiments, engaging ideas, and delightful anecdotes. Dan Ariely is a wise and amusing guide to the foibles, errors, and bloopers of everyday decision-making. (Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University and author of Stumbling on Happiness ) Dan Arielys ingenious experiments explore deeply how our economic behavior is influenced by irrational forces and social norms. In a charmingly informal style that makes it accessible to a wide audience, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL provides a standing criticism to the explanatory power of rational egotistic choice. (Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Prize in Economics 1972, Professor of Economics Stanford University ) After reading this book, you will understand the decisions you make in an entirely new way. (Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MITs Media Lab and founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit association ) Surprisingly entertaining. . . . Easy to read. . . . Arielys book makes economics and the strange happenings of the human mind fun. (USA Today ) A taxonomy of financial folly. (The New Yorker ) Dan Ariely is a genius at understanding human behavior: no economist does a better job of uncovering and explaining the hidden reasons for the weird ways we act, in the marketplace and out. PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL will reshape the way you see the world, and yourself, for good. (James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds ) A fascinating romp through the science of decision-making that unmasks the ways that emotions, social norms, expectations, and context lead us astray. (Time magazine ) The most difficult part of investing is managing your emotions. Dan explains why that is so challenging for all of us, and how recognizing your built-in biases can help you avoid common mistakes. (Charles Schwab, Chairman and CEO, The Charles Schwab Corporation ) PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL is wildly original. It shows whymuch more often than we usually care to admithumans make foolish, and sometimes disastrous, mistakes. Ariely not only gives us a great read; he also makes us much wiser. (George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2001 Koshland Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley ) Arielys book addresses some weighty issues . . . with an unexpected dash of humor. (Entertainment Weekly ) Arielys intelligent, exuberant style and thought-provoking arguments make for a fascinating, eye-opening read. (Publishers Weekly )

Dan Ariely: author's other books


Who wrote Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Predictably
Irrational

revised and expanded edition

The Hidden Forces
That Shape Our Decisions

Dan Ariely

To my mentors colleagues and students who make research exciting Contents - photo 1

To my mentors, colleagues, and students
who make research exciting

Contents

How an Injury Led Me to Irrationality and
to the Research Described Here

I have been told by many people that I have an unusual way of looking at the world. Over the last 20 years or so of my research career, its enabled me to have a lot of fun figuring out what really influences our decisions in daily life (as opposed to what we think, often with great confidence, influences them).

Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we dont really need?

Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a one-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?

Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who havent? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace?

By the end of this book, youll know the answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world. Understanding the answer to the question about aspirin, for example, has implications not only for your choice of drugs, but for one of the biggest issues facing our society: the cost and effectiveness of health insurance. Understanding the impact of the Ten Commandments in curbing dishonesty might help prevent the next Enron-like fraud. And understanding the dynamics of impulsive eating has implications for every other impulsive decision in our livesincluding why its so hard to save money for a rainy day.

My goal, by the end of this book, is to help you fundamentally rethink what makes you and the people around you tick. I hope to lead you there by presenting a wide range of scientific experiments, findings, and anecdotes that are in many cases quite amusing. Once you see how systematic certain mistakes arehow we repeat them again and againI think you will begin to learn how to avoid some of them.

But before I tell you about my curious, practical, entertaining (and in some cases even delicious) research on eating, shopping, love, money, procrastination, beer, honesty, and other areas of life, I feel it is important that I tell you about the origins of my somewhat unorthodox worldviewand therefore of this book. Tragically, my introduction to this arena started with an accident many years ago that was anything but amusing.

O N WHAT WOULD otherwise have been a normal Friday afternoon in the life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli, everything changed irreversibly in a matter of a few seconds. An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns.

The next three years found me wrapped in bandages in a hospital and then emerging into public only occasionally, dressed in a tight synthetic suit and mask that made me look like a crooked version of Spider-Man. Without the ability to participate in the same daily activities as my friends and family, I felt partially separated from society and as a consequence started to observe the very activities that were once my daily routine as if I were an outsider. As if I had come from a different culture (or planet), I started reflecting on the goals of different behaviors, mine and those of others. For example, I started wondering why I loved one girl but not another, why my daily routine was designed to be comfortable for the physicians but not for me, why I loved going rock climbing but not studying history, why I cared so much about what other people thought of me, and mostly what it is about life that motivates people and causes us to behave as we do.

During the years in the hospital following my accident, I had extensive experience with different types of pain and a great deal of time between treatments and operations to reflect on it. Initially, my daily agony was largely played out in the bath, a procedure in which I was soaked in disinfectant solution, the bandages were removed, and the dead particles of skin were scraped off. When the skin is intact, disinfectants create a low-level sting, and in general the bandages come off easily. But when there is little or no skinas in my case because of my extensive burnsthe disinfectant stings unbearably, the bandages stick to the flesh, and removing them (often tearing them) hurts like nothing else I can describe.

Early on in the burn department I started talking to the nurses who administered my daily bath, in order to understand their approach to my treatment. The nurses would routinely grab hold of a bandage and rip it off as fast as possible, creating a relatively short burst of pain; they would repeat this process for an hour or so until they had removed every one of the bandages. Once this process was over I was covered with ointment and with new bandages, in order to repeat the process again the next day.

The nurses, I quickly learned, had theorized that a vigorous tug at the bandages, which caused a sharp spike of pain, was preferable (to the patient) to a slow pulling of the wrappings, which might not lead to such a severe spike of pain but would extend the treatment, and therefore be more painful overall. The nurses had also concluded that there was no difference between two possible methods: starting at the most painful part of the body and working their way to the least painful part; or starting at the least painful part and advancing to the most excruciating areas.

As someone who had actually experienced the pain of the bandage removal process, I did not share their beliefs (which had never been scientifically tested). Moreover, their theories gave no consideration to the amount of fear that the patient felt anticipating the treatment; to the difficulties of dealing with fluctuations of pain over time; to the unpredictability of not knowing when the pain will start and ease off; or to the benefits of being comforted with the possibility that the pain would be reduced over time. But, given my helpless position, I had little influence over the way I was treated.

As soon as I was able to leave the hospital for a prolonged period (I would still return for occasional operations and treatments for another five years), I began studying at Tel Aviv University. During my first semester, I took a class that profoundly changed my outlook on research and largely determined my future. This was a class on the physiology of the brain, taught by professor Hanan Frenk. In addition to the fascinating material Professor Frenk presented about the workings of the brain, what struck me most about this class was his attitude to questions and alternative theories. Many times, when I raised my hand in class or stopped by his office to suggest a different interpretation of some results he had presented, he replied that my theory was indeed a possibility (somewhat unlikely, but a possibility nevertheless)and would then challenge me to propose an empirical test to distinguish it from the conventional theory.

Coming up with such tests was not easy, but the idea that science is an empirical endeavor in which all the participants, including a new student like myself, could come up with alternative theories, as long as they found empirical ways to test these theories, opened up a new world to me. On one of my visits to Professor Frenks office, I proposed a theory explaining how a certain stage of epilepsy developed, and included an idea for how one might test it in rats.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions»

Look at similar books to Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions»

Discussion, reviews of the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.