The Predictable Irrationality of Life

[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Jonathon Howard of Di Mortui Sunt]

I just finished reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions. It is yet another book cashing in on the market’s love of laymen economics, in the vein of The Tipping Point and Freakonomics.  Like its literary predecessors, PI claims to explain all the quirks of humanity through the lens of Econonics, which as a science has about the same amount of credibility as say your local weatherman.  You know, the one with an associates degree in journalism.

To Dan’s credit though, his field of economics is called “behavioral,” and the field conducts experiments involving actual humans as opposed to trolling through vast fields of numerical data, making random odd pairs in the hopes of stumbling upon one that is correlated significantly enough and then screaming it from the rooftops, as an insightful, new view of human transactions.

Back to the book.  Like I said, Dan’s ideas are backed by experiments. Experiments that Dan and his colleagues designed to answer questions like: “why do more expensive things seem to work better than cheap ones”; “why do we no longer bat an eye at paying 5 dollars for a cup of coffee when it used to be free at most places”; “why do we do things happily for free when we’d be insulted to do them if we were paid?”  The answers he gets are enlightening, but often contrary to our expectations and intuitions.  I wondered at times how Dan was able to extrapolate so much from some of his experiments and you might question his conclusions as well.

What I appreciated most about PI, though, is Dan’s efforts to help his readers overcome some of the flaws in our thinking and shore up some of that irrationality we all suffer from. Even if you disagree with the conclusions he draws from some of his experiments, the fact that we often act irrationally to our own disadvantage can’t be contested, our personal lives are full of examples, bringing this fact to light, to our the attention of our conscious self allows us to think about our actions and thought processes more fully and in so doing maybe help us highlight the mistakes we make in our economic transactions.

Which leads me to the next part of this post, Life Hacks. I’ve been reading recently the posts here at The Growing Life.  Productivity hobbyists and the sites that serve them seem to suffer from the same ailment that Oprah’s fans do. That our problems in our life can be solved with things.  It feels overly materialistic with a heavy covering of  consumerism to boot.  Life isn’t about things in all of their varied forms. Its about living and understanding how and why we live.  Self-help technology can be helpful, as can Productivity sites, but they often do not provide the “fix” people are looking for.

Dan Ariely’s book brings to our attention the fact that we make all sorts of decisions without properly thinking about them, and anything that helps us examine our lives is something I can recommend.

-Jonathan Howard