How do we think about money?
What caused bankers to lose sight of the economy?
What caused individuals to take on mortgages that were not within
their means?
What irrational forces guided our decisions?
And how can we recover from an economic crisis?
In this revised and expanded edition of the New York
Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller
Predictably Irrational, Duke University's behavioral
economist Dan Ariely explores the hidden forces that shape our
decisions, including some of the causes responsible for the current
economic crisis. Bringing a much-needed dose of sophisticated
psychological study to the realm of public policy, Ariely offers
his own insights into the irrationalities of everyday life, the
decisions that led us to the financial meltdown of 2008, and the
general ways we get ourselves into trouble.
Blending common experiences and clever experiments with
groundbreaking analysis, Ariely demonstrates how expectations,
emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical
forces skew our reasoning abilities. As he explains, our reliance
on standard economic theory to design personal, national, and
global policies may, in fact, be dangerous. The mistakes that we
make as individuals and institutions are not random, and they can
aggregate in the market-with devastating results. In light of our
current economic crisis, the consequences of these systematic and
predictable mistakes have never been clearer.
Packed with new studies and thought-provoking responses to
readers' questions and comments, this revised and expanded edition
of Predictably Irrational will change the way we interact
with the world-from the small decisions we make in our own lives to
the individual and collective choices that shape our economy.