Dan Ariely's insights include:
- The Power of Price: Why a 50–pence aspirin can do what a penny aspirin can't
- The Context of Our Character: Why recalling the Ten Commandments reduces people's tendency to lie
- The Safety of Cash: Why we fudge expense reports, but rarely swipe cash
If the behaviors that skew our judgments were random or senseless, we'd be hard put to sort them out and make better decisions. But research has shown that our irrationality is, in fact, systematic. People will make the same types of mistakes over and over, in a predictable manner, because the causes of these behaviors are embedded in the very structure of our minds. So recognizing them and understanding them offers us a way to do better.
And that's the aim of this book: to leave you with new knowledge of human nature, derived from a wide range of scientific experiments and findings, knowledge that will help you make better decisions in your personal life, your business life, and in the choices we all need to make about our collective welfare.