Occasional irrational behaviour makes us human

books:


	• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions Dan Ariely HarperCollins, 2008 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 146 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Very interesting

Nutshell review - This is a great read. A thoroughly interesting, thought provoking and enjoyable look into the world of behavioural economics, or why we do what we do even when it makes no apparent sense!

Occasional irrational behaviour makes us human

Predictably Irrational

Dan Ariely has written a brilliant book that makes behavioural economics as palatable as some of his food and beverage stories.

There is not a person on this earth who has not been surprised sometimes about the dumb choices he/she has made, particularly during stores' sales. Ariely salves the wounded part of the brain responsible for these out-of-character decisions and explains that we all make bad decisions, sometimes.

As a school administrator, duty of care demands that someone stays behind with the child who has not been picked up by an errant parent. We discussed ways of addressing the problem, including fines. Ariely (p. 76) points out that relationships are often defined as either social exchanges or market exchanges, and in the case that he described how a day care centre introduced fines for tardy parents. This meant that the parents shifted from a sense of social exchange guilt to a market exchange monetary cost. When parents worked out the amount of the fine, they then made a decision about meeting the pickup time. He warned that "once a social norm is trumped by a market norm- it will rarely return". A great warning for us.

A second timely warning he issued educators relates to performance-based salaries. The danger is that the majority of teachers, who are driven by the moral notion of doing "good" for students, will be moved from social norms to market norms. Taylorist managerialist decisions are problematic in teaching.

Basically, the book is a good read. It is entertaining, insightful and educative. A 5/5 from me.

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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!

Predictable review

I am probably guilty of writing a public review after reading some of the others. I enjoyed the book initially but did not feel that same sense of satisfaction finishing. Then I read that one person enjoyed the early chapters about relativity and felt the book lost steam in the end. I actually bought a new Macbook this week and ended up buying the "middle" model of three offered. Now I know why. I am glad I read the book, but I wish the later chapters were as interesting as the beginning of the 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.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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