Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
I loved Stuart Sutherland's book on human irrationality and have been intrigued by this subject ever since. So when one of my students presented this one to the class, I immediately went out and bought a copy. Author Dan Ariely, Director of eRationality at MIT, writes in a lighthearted style, but his book is packed with facts. And it behooves us to pay attention to our human propensities for making irrational decisions.
For one thing, marketers and other propagandists routinely use this knowledge to exploit us. For another, we all contain both Jekyll and Hyde (originally two opposing sides of one character in a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, these two human personae were recently featured in a musical at the Kennedy Center.)
The implications of having both a Jekyll and a Hyde side means that as Jekyll, we calmly believe ourselves to be rational and predictable. In states of high arousal, Hyde proves we're not. As the experiments done by Ariely and others suggest, we are quite unable to predict in which direction and how dramatically our inner Mr. Hyde side might deviate from our outer Dr. Jekyll.
A third great value that can be gleaned from this work is learning about the human tendency to put things off till the last possible moment. Based on his experimental results, Ariely makes some useful suggestions for combating procrastination, and reports how real college students have managed to wrestle with it. The clash he describes between business and social norms shows up the backwardness of certain contemporary business policies as well.
Finally, the author connects the human behaviour demonstrated in his experiments with larger issues of social policy. In view of what this writer and his fellow social scientists have discovered, many routinely used policies make little or no sense.
A fascinating read, Ariely's book is playful but informative. The author's willingness to speculate on possible ways of doing many things differently is another added value. As well as being basic reading for consumers, this is a must-read for students, any anyone running a business or working for a government or charity. In other words, anyone at all who needs to know more about human behaviour should read it.