Quotes About Ariely

#1. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, a book that offers an entertaining and engaging overview of behavioral economics.

Daniel H. Pink

#2. 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

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#6. ON AN INTUITIVE level, most of us understand the deep interconnection between identity and labor. Children think of their potential future occupations in terms of what they will be (firemen, teachers, doctors, behavioral economists, or what have you), not about the amount of money they will earn.

Dan Ariely

#7. If you think of people as making decisions actively, every time we think about the cup of coffee, we say, How much will I enjoy the cup of coffee, what else could I not do in the future because I buy this cup of coffee?

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#9. Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be really terrible.

Dan Ariely

#10. But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

Dan Ariely

#11. You're being paid a lot of money to maintain a distorted view of reality, but you don't notice the tricks that your big bonus plays on your perception of reality.

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Dan Ariely

#18. 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

#19. The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.

Dan Ariely

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. It seems then that instead of consumers' willingness to pay influencing market prices, the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers' willingness to pay.

Dan Ariely

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. [..] we human beings are ready and willing to steal something that does not explicitly reference monetary value - that is, something that lacks the face of a dead president.

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#34. 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

#35. Recognizing our shortcomings is a crucial first step on the path to making better decisions, creating better societies, and fixing our institutions.

Dan Ariely

#36. 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

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

Dan Ariely

#38. People are irrational - and predictably so.

Dan Ariely

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. the pleasure that I get day in and day out comes from working jointly with amazing researchers/friends -

Dan Ariely

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#49. 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

#50. [T]he distance Boston drivers generally maintain from the car in front of them is visible only with a good microscope.

Dan Ariely

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was.

Dan Ariely

#54. 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

#55. Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.

Dan Ariely

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them (including their desire to please others)

Dan Ariely

#59. If I pay you lots of money to see reality in a certain way, you will.

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#61. 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

#62. 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

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

Dan Ariely

#64. 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

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#67. (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

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#70. WHAT IS IT about FREE! that's so enticing? Why do we have an irrational urge to jump for a FREE! item, even when it's not what we really want?

Dan Ariely

#71. What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, "OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement."

Dan Ariely

#72. The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#74. The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: although initial prices (such as the price of Assael's pearls) are "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds they will shape not only present prices but also future prices (this makes them "coherent").

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#77. 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

#78. A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.

Dan Ariely

#79. People are sometimes willing to sacrifice the pleasure they get from a particular consumption experience in order to project a certain image to others.

Dan Ariely

#80. Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.

Dan Ariely

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

Dan Ariely

#82. We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend.

Dan Ariely

#83. 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

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

Dan Ariely

#85. That's a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity.

Dan Ariely

#86. It is very difficult to make really big,
important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible
to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them
than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we
like to admit.

Dan Ariely

#87. 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

#88. 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

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

Dan Ariely

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

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

Dan Ariely

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!

Dan Ariely

#99. 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

#100. religion attempts to influence our mind-set before we are tempted, by creating moral education and - let's not forget - guilt.

Dan Ariely