Bah Weep Granah Weep Ninni Bong, everybody. (If you actually get that reference I love you forever.)
So I just got done reading this one book, entitled "Predictably Irrational." It's actually a really fascinating piece of work. The author, Dan Ariely, is what is known as a Behavioral Economist, and his book has won the "notable book of the year" award from the New York Times.
The focus of Predictably Irrational is to take a close look at all of the little odd quirks and irrational mistakes that human beings tend to make in their every day lives and continue to keep making. Mistakes that, in the face of rational information or sense, should honestly not continue to happen. To give an example, there is the concept of "free" and how when a person sees something that mentions the word free (ex.Buy 2 get one free) a person will likely jump to grab at whatever this free item is, even if it means depriving the self of pleasure or engaging in behavior that one would not normally engage in.
MOST of the topics presented in the book are economically based. Predictably Irrational focuses greatly upon how human beings will make mistakes with money and be lured into making mistakes with their money (for example, spending more on designer jeans over jeans from Wal-Mart because obviously, if you spend more for your clothes they must be more comfortable) or how we deprive ourselves of pleasure to save money (for example, how everybody in an experiment decided to take a free Hershey's kiss over a fifteen cent Lindt Truffle [Which is hella cheap for a truffle and I'd know]) and how money insinuates a certain market relationship which can destroy social relationships (For example, you wouldn't offer to pay your mother in law for a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner, she'd kick you out of her house). (Ariely, 2008)
What the book does is it takes a close look at various ideas such as these and how irrational they are in the face of hard fact and economics, and delves into the way the mind works and justifies its actions when faced with these irrational situations. For example. Why did Black Pearls become so incredibly popular after the sixties when before then they were seen as near worthless? Because we associate them with rarity and high class because the first place they were ever prominently seen was a famous jewelry store and they were very high priced. Suddenly they become the most popular new "thing" even though their worth is actually very dubious. Worth is relative in this sense. (Ariely, 2008)
Or how about why we pay for the lousy pair of socks with the buy-one-get-one-free pitch rather than the good, padded hiking socks you went into the sports store for in the first place? Because we hear the word free and we immediately associate it with not losing anything in a transaction and immediately choose it as the most personally beneficial choice as a result. After all, you do have two pairs of socks now, right? Well, yes. But you're going to get blisters when you go hiking. (Ariely, 2008)
The book is full of all the things that humans do and they do on a regular basis without ever learning from their mistakes. It takes a look at them, analyzes them closely, gives experiments and results done to take a closer look at the phenomenon, and then explains why humans likely engage in these activities on a regular basis with no learning from or acknowledgement of their mistakes.
I chose this book because I have always held firm to the phrase "Humans are silly little creatures."It's something I say relatively often. So as I was looking up the descriptions of the tradebooks, I was interested to see just how silly humans might be and how irrational we really are on a day to day basis from a more professional perspective. And I must say I'm glad I read this book. Because not only did it validate my concerns as to the human's inherent "silliness," but it also helped explain what sorts of silly things we engage in in a great deal of depth, and also went into how we might avoid them or learn from them.
I would certainly recommend this book to others. In fact, I would recommend it to pretty much everybody on the planet it has that much to say. To the social psychology students, it actually treads almost exactly the same ground as last lesson's lecture about Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience and the traps marketers will set and how to avoid them... but it also goes much more in depth than we did and it has a lot more to say about the topics. Furthermore it does go into other concepts like sexual arousal and decision making, social relationships vs. market relationships (that thing with the mother in law), and trust issues in the modern world. And I truly think that if everyone were to learn from their irrationality and work to try and fix it through reading this book, we could all benefit.
The book is very clear and would be perfectly accessible to people with no psychology background and it is applicable in everyone's daily lives. The book has tips on how to deal with procrastination, how to deal with sneaky marketers and salesmen, how to make good decisions and stick with them, rather than flip-flopping between tons of choices as so many people do, and how to deal with close social relationships versus monetary relationships. An example of the first one, for example, is when there is no deadline to speak of, is to set specific deadlines for yourself. Or if there is a deadline, to adhere to it by setting specific smaller deadlines for yourself along the way. (Ariely, 2008) For me, a good example is how I engaged in a writing competition one time on the art site I frequent. The object was to write a 10,000 word scary story by the end of October 2010. The contest began at the end of September. The deadline was one month away, but I set small deadlines for myself at the very beginning. I would have 2500 words done every week. By adhering to that schedule I managed to get the story done painlessly. (I still didn't win though. I came in tenth place out of 89 contestants, however, so that's pretty impressive I think)
What I like about the book the most is the way in which it just lays bare everything we do that makes no sense, but it also gives us ways to fix our problems. An example would be the chapter on mistrust. There is a high amount of mistrust present in the American population of large corporations and companies because of how many times we have been screwed over by defective products or faulty customer service or executives trying to hide their asses. But the book lays bare how this might be fixed. It cites a poisoning scare by Tylenol in the 1980's where a biological terrorist spiced a number of Tylenol bottles with cyanide. Seven people died and Tylenol quickly recalled every bottle of Tylenol and urged consumers to throw out or return their bottles. It apologized and started an investigation. In the process it lost several million dollars and it looked like the company would collapse. However, when Tylenol came back a year later with safely sealed bottles, having completed their investigation, they had managed to build up trust in their consumers and they were back on top and doing better than ever. Consumers were pleased and Tylenol was pleased. Everyone was pleased. (Ariely, 2008)
But this is the best example of trust from a large company we have. The book outlines how if more companies would act in this manner, mistrust wouldn't be so high, and people would be happier all around, but people continue to shy away from possible good deals because they lack trust and companies continue to be dishonest. (Ariely, 2008)
The Author, Dan Ariely, has written one other book and is in the process of writing a third, which according to his personal website, will focus greatly on dishonesty. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D in Cognitive Psychology and a Ph.D in Business. He has also taught at both MIT and Duke University. Personally I happen to think that that alone makes him more credible than most of the population of the world. From what I read in his book, he seems to know what he is talking about and is a rather credible source.
This book is an excellent guide to how we, as human beings, are passionate, irrational creatures and how we might learn to help ourselves in the future to become smarter and more thoughtful of our actions. If I had to give one point that the book was trying to drive home it would be "stop, watch yourself, and learn from what you're doing."
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Source:
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational: The hidden forces that shape our behavior. (2 ed., Vol. 1). New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
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