Dan Ariely's Blog, page 65

There is a certain perverse pleasure in contemplating the perfect crime.

You can apply your ingenuity to the hypothetical issues of choosing a target, evading surveillance and law enforcement, dealing with contingencies and covering your tracks afterward. You can prove to yourself what an accomplished criminal mastermind you would be, if you so chose.

The perfect crime usually takes the form of a bank robbery in which the criminals cleverly bypass all security systems using neat gadgets...

This is an exciting day (but also a bit nerve-racking).

After a lot of hard work, "The Upside of Irrationality" is finally out, and now all I can do is to stand by and see how people react to it.  The Upside of Irrationality covers different topics from Predictably Irrational, but it is also much more personal (hence the nerve-racking part).

Here is a short intro to this book, and if you end up reading it, let me know what you think:

I am going to be on a book tour for a few weeks, and here is a...

So — how rational are you in terms of the ideas presented in "The Upside of Irrationality"?

Take the test here

Use this version if you want to take the test on an iPhone

Use this version if you want to take the test on a Blackberry

And good luck

Dan

When businesses want to find answers to questions in marketing, whom do they ask? Do they set up experiments to test their ideas, pitting the approach they think is most effective against alternatives? Do they survey consumers on a large scale? Do they go to experts who have questioned and requestioned their theories? Surprisingly, the answer is no. Most often, businesses rely on small "focus groups" to answer big questions.  They rely on the intuition of about 10-12 lay people with no...

We are about to embark on a project that compares moral judgments across countries — and for that we need some help in translating our questions.

We started with Google translate, but now we need people who can help us check and fix the translation.  If you are fluent in one of the following languages:

Arabic

Bahasa Indonesia

Bahasa Malaysia

Bulgarian

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

Estonian

Finish

Greek

Japanese

Hungarian

Japanese

Latvian

Lithuanian

Norwegian

Vietnamese

Ukrainian

Thai

Swedish

Swahili

Slovak

Romanian

Plea...

After a short break, my podcast (Arming the Donkeys) is back..

.

This week, my guest is Talma Hendler, founder and director of the Functional Brain Center at Tel Aviv University. She talks about solders and stress, including new research into how we can predict which soldiers may be most susceptible to conditions like PTSD.

After a short break, my podcast (Arming the Donkeys) is back..

.

This week, my guest is Talma Hendler, founder and director of the Functional Brain Center at Tel Aviv University. She talks about solders and stress, including new research into how we can predict which soldiers may be most susceptible to conditions like PTSD.

April 29th — happy birthday to me.

Here are some reflections on Shaving, Squash, Sunk cost, and the "pain of paying"

Click here to view the embedded video.

Irrationally yours

Dan

As of today the paperback version of PI is out.

I took out the parts about the stock market, and added 2 new chapters: one about the effects of social norms, and one about the cycle distrust in marketers and markets.

Sadly I cannot distribute these digitally, but if you are every in a book store or a library (or if you think that this worth $10) ….

Irrationally yours

Dan