It emerged largely in response to work done in the nineteen-seventies by the Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Offered FREE shipping, we take it, even when it costs us.Īs an academic discipline, Ariely’s field-behavioral economics-is roughly twenty-five years old. “We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.” So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors. “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless-they are systematic,” he writes.
He claims that his experiments, and others like them, reveal the underlying logic to our illogic.
In pursuit of his research, Ariely has served beer laced with vinegar, left plates full of dollar bills in dorm refrigerators, and asked undergraduates to fill out surveys while masturbating. His approach is empirical rather than historical or theoretical. In “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” (Harper $25.95), Dan Ariely, a professor at M.I.T., offers a taxonomy of financial folly. The real mystery, it could be argued, isn’t why we make so many poor economic choices but why we persist in accepting economic theory. Yet actual economic life, as opposed to the theoretical version, is full of miscalculations, from the gallon jar of mayonnaise purchased at spectacular savings to the billions of dollars Americans will spend this year to service their credit-card debt. Rational calculators are supposed to consider their options, then pick the one that maximizes the benefit to them.
Why do people do things like this? From the perspective of neoclassical economics, self-punishing decisions are difficult to explain. By the time I was done, I had saved The New Yorker $3.99 in shipping charges. I clicked it into the shopping cart and checked out. After much discussion, they picked a three-in-one volume containing two adventures they had previously read. Since they already own a large stack of Tintins, it was hard to find one that they didn’t have. 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. I thought about whether there were other books that I might need, or want. “Add $7.00 to your order to qualify for FREE Super Saver Shipping!” I was ordering the book for work still, I hesitated.
I clicked to add it to my “shopping cart” and a message popped up on the screen. The book had a list price of twenty-four dollars Amazon was offering it for eighteen. SEYMOUR CHWASTĪ couple of months ago, I went on-line to order a book. People make bad decisions, but they make them in systematic ways.
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