The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, whichhouse to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself thisquestion: What would Xiang Yu do?

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who tookhis troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performedan experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking potsand burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them onmoving forward – a motivational speech that was not appreciated by manyof the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and inthe annals of social science research.

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WHAT WAS I THINKING?The latest reasoning about our irrational ways.  

by Elizabeth Kolbert; FEBRUARY 25, 2008

People make bad decisions, but they make them in systematic ways.

Acouple of months ago, I went on-line to order a book. The book had a list price of twenty-four dollars; Amazon was offering it for eighteen. I clicked to add it to my “shopping cart” and a message popped up on the screen. “Wait!” it admonished me. “Add $7.00 to your order to qualify for FREE Super Saver Shipping!” I was ordering the book for work; still, I hesitated. I thought about whether there were other books that I might need, or want. I couldn’t think of any, so I got up from my desk, went into the living room, and asked my nine-year-old twins. They wanted a Tintin book. Since they already own a large stack of Tintins, it was hard to find one that they didn’t have. They scrolled through the possibilities. After much discussion, they picked a three-in-one volume containing two adventures they had previously read. I clicked it into the shopping cart and checked out. By the time I was done, I had saved The New Yorker $3.99 in shipping charges. Meanwhile, I had cost myself $12.91.

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Making the Same Mistake Twice–And Why a Smart Buy Probably Isn’t
BY EMILY BOBROW | FEBRUARY 15, 2008 | PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: THE HIDDEN FORCES THAT SHAPE OUR DECISIONS

I missed the deadline with this book review. Although I had plenty of time to work on it (having pitched it in December), I procrastinated and ultimately pulled an all-nighter to get it in. This sacrificed my personal utility–that is, the amount of satisfaction I have derived from this assignment. Clearly, this was not a very rational thing to do.
Why on earth did I do it? According to Predictably Irrational, a fascinating new book of behavioral economics by Dan Ariely, to dither is human. “We have problems with self-control, related to immediate and delayed gratification,” he writes. We’re inclined to put off work, even if this makes little sense in light of our long-term goals.
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PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions    Most people don’t know what they want and don’t know that they want it-until they see it and the reptilian brain kicks in. “Everything is relative,” writes economist Ariely (Behavioral Economics/MIT), “and that’s the point.” His book, a cousin to Freakonomics and The Long Tail, is a spry treatise on how the world works and how we spend our money based on other people’s rules. Knowing that everything is relative, says Ariely, a merchandiser will display a 19-inch television next to 26-inch and 32-inch models, the prices progressing from $210 to $385 to $580, with the point being to sell the nicely profitable, nicely midsize model first. Of course, because we want more relative to what we have, that merchandiser will hope to see us again, now clamoring for the bigger, more expensive model. Thus the economy chugs along, and thus our credit debt deepens. When the time comes to buy that bigger goodie, then we will respond to an “anchor price” that somehow worms its way into our mind. This is the same anchor price that leads us to think that a four-dollar cup of coffee is acceptable, and after doing it once, we do it again, for we now “assume that this is the way you want to spend your money.” Is it? Maybe not, but people are funny creatures of habit, and it is for all of us that Ariely has a brilliant solution to a problem that is very real: “a self-control credit card that would let people restrict their own spending behavior,” categorically and overall, fixing, say, grocery spending at $200 a week and coffee spending at $75 a month. Fat chance of it catching on, he allows: After all, the credit-card companies make $17 billion a year in interest charges. They know our irrational ways, too. Make a point of seeing this book. That way you’ll know you want it, and you will.

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If I did not know that the people around me were talking about Obama, I would have guessed that I was among a group of excited fans, infatuated with a rock singer, or a movie star. In fact, when I ask Obama supporters about how they expect him to fare against other US presidents, their general answer is that he is likely to be the best president of all time (some think he will be second to JFK). (more…)

Try, one day, to walk up to someone, maybe up to many people, and tell them that you think they have made a mistake in their most recent decision. You can even try to sugar-coat it by telling them that the reason for this mistake is not because they are stupid or negligent, but because this is just the way they are wired — just the way their brain works. (more…)

The big day!

I stayed awake until midnight, just to see the countdown on my computer arrive at the “In Stores Now!” I went to bed soon after but at 2:30 AM woke up, full of excitement, and could not fall a sleep again. I was not too worried because I was sure that the excitement would give me sufficient energy for the day ahead and indeed this was correct.

From 7:00 AM until 4:30 PM I went from studio to interview and back to studio. TV was a bit strange because the time was so short, and the pace was so fast. Radio was more relaxed and conversational. Magazine interviews felt even more natural. (more…)

I am delighted to announce the birth of Predictably Irrational.

Predictably Irrational was born after a rather long but mostly painless labor, and so far seems healthy and in good spirit. Predictably Irrational is largely orange and blue, but they tell me that this is normal (or at least acceptable).

At birth it is about 300 pages, and 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches.

They tell me that the next few weeks will be a lot of work around the clock, and sleepless nights. But as the proud father, I am looking forward to this next step.

Dan

Some time ago I realized that I was a bit tired of the dryness of academic writing, and I wanted to write something different and fun (at least for me).

After some contemplation I decided to combine my passion for the kitchen with my passion for my research and write a guide for the kitchen from the perspective of decision making and human irrationality. I was excited. I even found a name for the project–Dining Without Crumbs: The Art of Eating Over the Kitchen Sink.

Excited, I sat down and wrote a book proposal. When I finished, I gave it to MIT press and e-mailed it to a few literary agents. As it turned out, no one was very excited about the idea of a social scientist writing a guide to the kitchen. Eventually I got good advice from Susan Arellano, a literary agent that was representing my good friend Greg Berns. (more…)

Leonard Lee, George Loewenstein, James Hong, Jim Young and I recently conducted a study on the ways that one’s own attractiveness influences their perception of, and actions toward, others.

The first question we had is whether people who are less attractive themselves view the attractiveness of others differently. Using data sets from HOTorNOT.com we found that regardless of how attractive people themselves are, they seem to judge others’ attractiveness in similar ways, supporting the notion that we have largely universal, culturally independent standards of beauty (e.g. symmetric faces). Moreover, we found that people prefer to date others who are moderately more attractive than they are themselves. (more…)