Dan Ariely Quotes

#1. The difference between two cents and one cent is small. But the difference between one cent and zero is huge!

Dan Ariely

#2. The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.

Dan Ariely

#3. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." The question is: where is the line?

Dan Ariely

#4. Use a clock in the upper righthand corner to indicate how much time the user has saved because of your product.

Dan Ariely

#5. In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.

Dan Ariely

#6. (Giving your mother-in-law a gift is a good idea, but paying her for a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner is not recommended, even if both gestures would cost you the same amount of money.)

Dan Ariely

#7. From the beginning, for instance, Assael "anchored" his pearls to the finest gems in the world-and the prices followed forever after.

Dan Ariely

#8. In terms of the actual curriculum for management education, my own view is very simple-minded: The world is incredibly complex, it changes all the time, and we should not even hope that we could create a general model that accurately describes the world in all its possible states.

Dan Ariely

#9. Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.

Dan Ariely

#10. That when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.

Dan Ariely

#11. I don't want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it's very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset.

Dan Ariely

#12. We don't really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor's, and they're going on vacation that's slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand.

Dan Ariely

#13. Companies, however
unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees.

Dan Ariely

#14. what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don't in fact have a good handle on their own preferences

Dan Ariely

#15. When you get a checking account, you should have a savings account, and the number for the savings account should be one off of your checking account.

Dan Ariely

#16. Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we've done so far, what mistakes we've made, and what improvements should come next.

Dan Ariely

#17. Thoreau wrote, "Simplify! Simplify!" And, indeed, simplification is one mark of real genius.

Dan Ariely

#18. MONEY, AS IT turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.

Dan Ariely

#19. If you ever go bar hopping, who do you want to take with you? You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. Similar ... but slightly uglier.

Dan Ariely

#20. Vacations are not just about the two weeks you are away from work; they're also about the time you spend anticipating and imagining your trip, as well as the time after the trip when you get to replay special moments from your vacation in your mind.

Dan Ariely

#21. I don't think we should go around life and being miserable all the time and feel the pain of paying. It's a question of what categories we want to spend more on and what categories we want feel that we are spending too much on and we want to cut down.

Dan Ariely

#22. The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy.

Dan Ariely

#23. The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.

Dan Ariely

#24. introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult.

Dan Ariely

#25. A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its "resting state" in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over time.

Dan Ariely

#26. When people think about a placebo such as the royal touch, they usually dismiss it as "just psychology." But, there is nothing "just" about the power of a placebo, and in reality it represents the amazing way our mind controls our body.

Dan Ariely

#27. We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn't stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings.

Dan Ariely

#28. What people do is they pay the small loans first. Why? Because they enjoy making the number of loans smaller. But of course it is a very ineffective way to pay debt down.

Dan Ariely

#29. We talk about honesty, but the reality is we have lots of human values, and they are not all compatible. We don't always tell the truth about everything, no matter what the consequences.

Dan Ariely

#30. Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else.

Dan Ariely

#31. In running back and forth among the things that might be important, we forget to spend enough time on what really is important.

Dan Ariely

#32. Marketing is all about providing information that will heighten someone's anticipated and real pleasure.

Dan Ariely

#33. We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception.

Dan Ariely

#34. In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator.

Dan Ariely

#35. our irrationality happens the same way, again and again. Whether we are acting as consumers, businesspeople, or policy makers, understanding how we are predictably irrational provides a starting point for improving our decision making and changing the way we live for the better.

Dan Ariely

#36. If you're a company, my advice is to remember that you can't have it both ways. You can't treat your customers like family one moment and then treat them impersonally - or, even worse, as a nuisance or a competitor - a moment later when this becomes more convenient or profitable.

Dan Ariely

#37. The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don't see how our conflicts of interest work on us.

Dan Ariely

#38. Why would you take money out of your paycheck at the beginning of the month when you don't know how much money you'll need?

Dan Ariely

#39. Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.

Dan Ariely

#40. Money are very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota?

Dan Ariely

#41. One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

Dan Ariely

#42. Sadly, most of us often prefer immediately gratifying short-term experiences over our long-term objectives.* We routinely behave as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired or stressed.

Dan Ariely

#43. When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.

Dan Ariely

#44. Your immediate environment is comprised of coffee shops, supermarkets, websites, apps and all kinds of things - none of which have an interest in your long-term or short-term financial well-being.

Dan Ariely

#45. The question, then, is whether the only force that keeps us from carrying out misdeeds is the fear of being seen by others ...

Dan Ariely

#46. Without constant suspicion, we can get more out of our exchanges with others while spending less time making sure that others will fulfill their promise to us.

Dan Ariely

#47. But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .

Dan Ariely

#48. There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.

Dan Ariely

#49. The first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent.

Dan Ariely

#50. Believing you are a bad person leads to a slippery slope.

Dan Ariely

#51. The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.

Dan Ariely

#52. Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. Why? I think it's because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss.

Dan Ariely

#53. religions attempt to influence our mind-sets in the moment of temptation by incorporating different moral reminders into our environment.

Dan Ariely

#54. The translation of joy into willingness to work seems to depend to a large degree on how much meaning we can attribute to our own labor.

Dan Ariely

#55. Linking financial element to energy consumption I think has a huge role if you think about a display instrument that could teach us about what we are using, how much it costs us, how much it is saving, and therefore change our decisions.

Dan Ariely

#56. There are many examples to show that people will work more for a cause than for cash.

Dan Ariely

#57. Every year, employees' theft and fraud at the workplace are estimated at about $600 billion.

Dan Ariely

#58. Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.

Dan Ariely

#59. as in the first experiment, the individuals who were more creative also had higher levels of dishonesty. Intelligence, however, wasn't correlated to any degree with dishonesty.

Dan Ariely

#60. Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?

Dan Ariely

#61. One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne

Dan Ariely

#62. We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things - our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better.

Dan Ariely

#63. We all think that in the future, we are wonderful people. We will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will exercise, we will eat well ... The problem is we never get to live in that future. We always live in the present.

Dan Ariely

#64. People are irrational - and predictably so.

Dan Ariely

#65. None of us always make the best financial decisions.

Dan Ariely

#66. According to neuroscience research from 2012, it is intrinsically rewarding to talk about oneself. This is perhaps why Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms like Tumblr have been such successful products.

Dan Ariely

#67. Every enticing item you pass in the window and don't buy is a crushed impulse, slowly whittling away at your reserve of willpower - making it much more likely that later in the day you will fall for temptation.

Dan Ariely

#68. It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.

Dan Ariely

#69. Human beings are inherently social and trusting animals.

Dan Ariely

#70. In a blind taste, balsamic vinegar actually makes it taste better).

Dan Ariely

#71. Most blogs have very low readership - perhaps only the blogger's mother or best friend reads them - but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions of people to blog.

Dan Ariely

#72. When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.

Dan Ariely

#73. Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery.

Dan Ariely

#74. Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly.

Dan Ariely

#75. Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don't want to be honest all the time.

Dan Ariely

#76. A glass of wine will taste better after reading a positive review of it,

Dan Ariely

#77. When you're in pain, tomorrow doesn't exist - just the pain - and the only thing that you want in the world is for it to go away.

Dan Ariely

#78. We are all very good at rationalizing our actions so that they are in line with our selfish motives.

Dan Ariely

#79. Understand that relativity is everywhere, and that we view everything through its lens - rose-colored or otherwise. When you meet someone in a different country or city and it seems that you have magical connection, realize that the enchantment might be limited to the surrounding circumstances.

Dan Ariely

#80. Honesty, transparency, conscientiousness, and fair dealing should be bedrock corporate principles.

Dan Ariely

#81. If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.

Dan Ariely

#82. People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.

Dan Ariely

#83. Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves.

Dan Ariely

#84. We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

Dan Ariely

#85. in order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain." H

Dan Ariely

#86. Some special conpanies see trust as the pulic good.

Dan Ariely

#87. The people who need to overcome temptation to the highest degree have the hardest time doing it.

Dan Ariely

#88. The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you're actually more and more likely to fail.

Dan Ariely

#89. In a modern democracy, he said, people are beset not by a lack of opportunity, but by a dizzying abundance of it.

Dan Ariely

#90. One that we are just beginning to understand- is that trust, once eroded, is very hard to restore.

Dan Ariely

#91. Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

Dan Ariely

#92. Man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything. - FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

Dan Ariely

#93. I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.

Dan Ariely

#94. Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.

Dan Ariely

#95. The Hedonic Treadmill By failing to anticipate the extent of our hedonic adaptation, as consumers we routinely escalate our purchases, hoping that new stuff will make us happier.

Dan Ariely

#96. With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.

Dan Ariely

#97. the girls had on enough makeup to make Elizabeth Taylor look unadorned

Dan Ariely

#98. Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.

Dan Ariely

#99. Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.

Dan Ariely

#100. It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating - on our taxes or on the football field.

Dan Ariely