Dan Ariely's Blog, page 64

On Friday July 9th at 1:30 PM EST I will have an online office hour on Duke's Ustream channel.to discuss The Upside of Irrationality.

You can submit questions in advance or during the session by email to [email protected], on the Duke University Live Ustream page on Facebook or via Twitter with the tag #dukelive.

If this will work out maybe we will do more of these…

Irrationally yours

Dan

I personally find fruit and vegetables to be not only healthy, but also delicious. I enjoy cooking and preparing them, and try to eat them often. Sometimes I wind up spending egregious amounts of money getting the freshest local organic produce. Still, even when I empty my wallet at the farmer's market, some of my fruit and veggies inevitably end up wilting or rotting in the fridge, leaving a fairly unpleasant sludge. A number of things could contribute to this waste – but I'd like to point o...

Sometimes comedy has a lot of reality in it — this is one of these cases

What are the effects of high prices, packaging, and fancy descriptions?  often they lead to higher evaluations and higher willingness to pay ….

Sometimes comedy has a lot of reality in it — this is one of these cases

What are the effects of high prices, packaging, and fancy descriptions?  often they lead to higher evaluations and higher willingness to pay ….

What would you think if someone told you: Do the right thing because your life may depend on it. Or more accurately, that you better start making better decisions because it is a matter of life and death. This may sound like something an over protective parent would tell their child) but in reality it's the way most of us should start to think about our day to day decisions and their potential to lead to harmful habits and fatal consequences. It is hard to believe that this is true, but...

How are bonuses influencing performance?

Often people expect that higher bonuses will yield higher level of ability and performance — but do they?

Here is a talk I gave on this topic (see also Chapter 1 in "The Upside of Irrationality")

The thing about habits is that for good and bad they require no thinking. An established habit, whether getting ready for work in the morning or having a whiskey after, is a pattern of behavior we've adopted—we stick to it regardless of whether it made sense when we initially adopted it, and whether it makes sense to continue with it years later.  From a human irrationality perspective this means that something we do "just once" can wind up becoming a habit and part of our activities for a...

From the NYT Sunday Book Review:

STUFF YOUR BRAIN SAYS: "The Upside of Irrationality," Dan Ariely's follow-up to his 2008 best seller "Predictably Irrational," hits the hardcover list at No. 12 this week. Ariely, a professor at Duke, is a leading researcher in behavioral economics. One of the field's concerns is the way we tend to misjudge future pleasure — for example, by imagining that a new Ferrari will make us feel much happier than it actually does. But making The New York Times...

A few months ago, I had the idea to create an iPhone app that would give me (us) compliments. It turns out that as humans, not only are we sensitive to rude remarks from strangers, but we are also very excited when we get kind words, even if they are just random; they just make us feel much better, even if these strangers don't know us very well.

At a boy! is a completely free app, and you can find it here.

HOW TO USE: when you open the app you get a compliment and if you want a new one simply ...

The New York Times Sunday Book Review, just published a review of the Upside of Irrationality.

In general I think that the review is very good, but there is one point that made me wonder (and of course I focused on the one point that was less positive in the review).

One of the main differences between "The Upside" and PI is that this time around I wrote in a much more personal way about some of my experiences and how they got me thinking differently about different aspects of life (dating...