Uncovering the Unseen Forces Behind Our Choices: An Exploration of Predictably Irrational Decisions

Sue Brooks: I gave it 5 stars in hopes people will research the author’s history before they purchase. Supposedly he manipulates data, a lot.

United States on Oct 07, 2023

Sara: Great insights. Good teaching at an easy read. Highly recommend to anyone interested in behavioral economics or marketing. 5 stars

United Kingdom on Sep 23, 2023

Paul: I enjoyed this, full of information written in an interesting and fascinating way. It needs an update though as it was written in 2009 and I would love to see some more recent facts and figures.

United Kingdom on Aug 19, 2023

Ian Robertson: Dan Ariely, an economist at M.I.T., tells us that “life with fewer market norms and more social norms would be more satisfying, creative, fulfilling and fun.” Ariely, then, sets himself the formidable task of conveying to readers how our typical behavior is different from market norms, why we should care, and how the information might be helpful to us. Books about neoclassical economics are not typically best-sellers – even in the hands of exceptional writers such as Peter Bernstein and Robert Heilbroner – but Ariely specializes in behavioral economics, a new road that considers choice by humans rather than utility maximizing points on a graph. Ariely’s personal, raconteur style of writing makes Predictably Irrational a captivating and edifying read.

Dan Ariely is a researcher who has participated or led many interesting experiments. The experiments test whether we exhibit different versions of ourselves under different circumstances, something we know to be true anecdotally from experience, but which becomes fascinating when relayed to us as part of a structured test. Rest assured, despite our intuition and experience with our own lives, some of the outcomes will...

Canada on Dec 27, 2019

Standards Geek: If you're a professional economist, you'll probably find this book occasionally annoying for minor variants in terminology and the digs at conventional economics that become more frequent as the book goes on. If you're not you won't have a problem.

I recommend this book to any layman who wants to understand what behavioral economics is about without excess detail. In that sense it's "Kahnemann Lite" (Thinking Fast and Slow), but really the two books are complements, not substitutes. I'm going to give both to my high school senior daughter who will likely major in psychology, sociology, or some combination of the two in college.

As a professional economist myself I would have like to have seen a nod to the real problems of modeling the effects of predictable irrationality on social behavior and especially markets. There's a bit in the best of behavioral finance, but not much. And it's important. The reason the best economists haven't given up on rationality isn't that they don't believe in irrational behavior. It's that getting predictions sharper than "anything might happen" when agents aren't rational is hard to do, and in fact economists have come up with some...

Japan on Jan 17, 2016

milancool: Looking for the next book I would read after having finished books on neuroscience and behavioral economics, I ran into this book on Amazon website. Because I didn’t know the author, I checked him up on Wikipedia, which showed he had suffered burns all over his body in an explosion incident when he was young. I immediately become curious about how such a misfortuned person overcame difficulties and became a topnotch professor, which led me to have this book.
This book is very interesting and not so challenging to read even if you don’t know behavioral science. By citing a lot of actual evidence and experiments, I believe that he succeeded in getting his work easy to understand for readers. The followings are what I am impressed with from this book.

1. We are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. This holds true not only for physical things but for experiences and for ephemeral things as well: emotions, attitudes, and points of view.

・I think we always do so consciously or unconsciously.

2. Why do we have an irrational urge to jump for a FREE item, even when it is not what we really want? It’s because humans are intrinsically...

Japan on Mar 23, 2013

Minutemen: I have not written any product reviews on Amazon, but I was forced into writing one because of my sincere admiration and new-found respect for Prof. Dan Ariely. I was introduced to the science of Behavioral Economics and the irrational decisions people make in their lives. The author, through his experiments, has an uncanny knack of explaining all the profound concepts in a simple and entertaining manner. The contents in this book will quite literally open your eyes and make you wonder how people are living in this so-called idealistic world of rational decision making. Some of the key ideas presented in this book are:

-> How humans perceive value - "not in absolute terms, but one with respect to another," and this is how companies and marketers deceive people with "seemingly attractive" offers that you cannot resist.
-> Market forces of supply and demand only apply to rational people - in the real world, companies exploit people's irrationality and influence prices and demand.
-> The power of FREE - People are, in essence, losing some other resource in trying to procure FREE items.
-> The wonderful distinction of market and social norms, and why and...

United States on Mar 03, 2013

Charles A.: "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" by Ariely Ariely (PI), was an interesting read, and deserves to be looked at by economist, psychologist, marketer, or just people looking to improve their selves alike. It follows the trend, set by Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, in discussion of esoteric economic concepts, but without the academese that tends to keep casual readers away. I found myself personally engrossed while reading this novel due to the parallels of irrational behavior I discovered I also exhibited and will be actively correcting. The following three I believe have sentimental value to me and I feel are genuinely worth discussing.

Zero cost irrationality as described by PI is the concept that reviews the large bias humans show towards "free." I put free in quotations as I am using the term loosely in this context as often the decision chosen is not without cost, and in relative terms, it is often not the option that held the most value per unit of the exchanging intermediary item. In fact, just a few hours before writing this brief review, I purchased three Publix cloth shopping bags that I had no intention of...

United States on Feb 27, 2010