Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

By Dan Ariely. 2008

2,139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? The answers will surprise you. Predictably Irrational is an intriguing, witty and utterly original look at why we all make illogical decisions. Why can a 50p aspirin do what a 5p aspirin can't? If an item is "free" it must be a bargain, right? Why is everything relative, even when it shouldn't be? How do our expectations influence our actual opinions and decisions? In this astounding book, behavioural economist Dan Ariely cuts to the heart of our strange behaviour, demonstrating how irrationality often supplants rational thought and that the reason for this is embedded in the very structure of our minds. Predicatably Irrational brilliantly blends everyday experiences with a series of illuminating and often surprising experiments, that will change your understanding of human behaviour. And, by recognising these patterns, Ariely shows that we can make better decisions in business, in matters of collective welfare, and in our everyday lives from drinking coffee to losing weight, buying a car to choosing a romantic partner.

Subfields: Accounting

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/212daa39d45d5670fb92e0ed43449f7b537fc6f5

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Citations in the corpus

The Construction and Contributions of "Implications for Practice": What's in Them and What Might They Offer? (2010, neutral): “Note that in addition to taking a principlesbased approach, Ariely (2008) also encourages readers to take an expansive, imaginative stance toward how they might apply the information in ways not mentioned by the author.”
Research, part of a Special Feature on Compensation and Reward for Environmental Services in the Tropics Principles for Fairness and Efficiency in Enhancing Environmental Services in Asia: Payments, Compensation, or Co-Investment? (2010, neutral): “Behavioral economics (Ariely 2008) explores how monetary markets and their efficiency concept interact with fairness concepts that refer to social exchanges, image, and identity (Akerlof and Shiller 2009).”
The Society of Algorithms (2021, background): “While algorithms can make intimately lived truths external and modulatory, shifting “the sense by which we take our bearings in the world” (Arendt 2006, p. 252), they are unlikely to fundamentally transform howmajor structural formations, such as gender or race, operate in the world, as we…”
Economic Emergence: an Evolutionary Economic Perspective (2012, background): “A common mistake is to think that this is irrational behaviour (Ariely (2008)).”
Conscience without cognition: The effects of subconscious priming on ethical behavior (2014, positive): “Following the tasks that activated moral standards either subconsciously or consciously, unethical behavior was assessed with a measure from Gino, Norton, and Ariely (2010) in which participants read a scenario describing a manager who has an opportunity to behave unethically; they then indicated ho”
Valuation Techniques for Social Cost-Benefit Analysis: (2011, background): “Sugden (2005) argues that the most credible explanations for this relate to the psychological arguments concerning loss aversion and its derivative; the endowment effect (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Loewenstein and Adler, 1995; Ariely, 2009).”
Behavioural economics and its implications for transport (2012, neutral): “Many popular books, such as Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008), Predictably Irrational (Ariely, 2008), Influence (Cialdini , 2007), Yes!”
Disentangling the Roles of Approach, Activation and Valence in Instrumental and Pavlovian Responding (2011, background): “Pavlovian interference likely contributes to many quirks of behaviour such as impulsivity [12], framing and [13], endowment effects [14] and many other ‘‘anomalies’’ [15], including neurological [16–19] and psychiatric diseases [20–26].”
‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a mode of regulation by design (2017, positive): “Yet, as behavioural economist Dan Ariely demonstrates, ‘the power of free can get us to make many foolish decisions’ (Ariely, 2009).”
Effects of religious setting on cooperative behavior: a case study from Mauritius (2013, background): “An alternative hypothesis, then, is that the prosocial (as well as anti-social: Ginges, Hansen, & Norenzayan, 2009) effects of religion lie not in religiosity per se but in the implicit contextual cues that religious environments provide (Bulbulia, 2010; Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008).”
Do Your Online Friends Make You Pay? A Randomized Field Experiment on Peer Influence in Online Social Networks (2014, background): “Clinical trials deal with special circumstances of mind-body connection: it is well known (Ariely 2010) that a placebo pill itself can demonstrate signiﬁcant improvements in patient health as compared to no treatment at all.”