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Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions | 
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Author: Dan Ariely
Publisher: HarperCollins
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $15.33
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Avg. Customer Rating:  114 reviews
Sales Rank: 107
Format: Roughcut
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.4
ISBN: 006135323X
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.83
EAN: 9780061353239
ASIN: 006135323X
Publication Date: February 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: This item is new. Just like the one on the shelf at the bookstore only cheaper!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 109 more reviews...
 Occasional irrational behaviour makes us human July 6, 2008
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.
My Favorite Book July 2, 2008
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!
Irrationality laid bare June 27, 2008
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.
Practical application for a sales guy... June 27, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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!
 Who Decides "Better"? June 23, 2008
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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