Dan Ariely quotes

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

#Sex #Teenage #Thinking

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.
-- Dan Ariely

#Smart #Addresses #Irrational

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

#Honesty #Want #Being Honest

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

#Incentives #Sometimes #Conflict

The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. … The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying ‘uh huh,’ [you] dramatically improve people's motivations.
-- Dan Ariely

#Motivation #Eye #People

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

#Simple #Views #World

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?
-- Dan Ariely

#Mistake #Odd #Found

We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.
-- Dan Ariely

#Data #Decision #Tools

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

#Depressing #Confused #Smart

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

#Ideas #Two #People

What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you're creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.
-- Dan Ariely

#People #Creative #Would Be

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

#Temptation #Failing #Shows

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

#Cheating #People #Cash

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

#Years #Clothes #Retail

that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.
-- Dan Ariely

#Opportunity #People #Honest

individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them (including their desire to please others)
-- Dan Ariely

#Desire #Suits #Honest

When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride.
-- Dan Ariely

#Motivation #Pride #Thinking

Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.
-- Dan Ariely

#Thinking #Sometimes #Difficult

Companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees.
-- Dan Ariely

#Motivation #Choke #Employee

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

#Creative #Mind #Stories

People are irrational - and predictably so.
-- Dan Ariely

#People #Irrational

With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.
-- Dan Ariely

#Facts #Behavior #Should

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.
-- Dan Ariely

When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations … we could design a better world.
-- Dan Ariely

#Retirement #Thinking #Ideas

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

#Teacher #Strong #School

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

#Lessons #Want #Break

...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.
-- Dan Ariely

#Running #Business #Technology

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.
-- Dan Ariely

#Believe #Reality #Light

The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.
-- Dan Ariely

#Our Society #Moral #Compass

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.
-- Dan Ariely

#Stress #People #Mind

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

#People #News #Stories

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

#Mistake #Done #Next

In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.
-- Dan Ariely

#Tattoo #Motivation #Inspiration

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

#Motivation #Inspiration #Bars

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

#Focus #Tragedy #Needs

One percent of people will always be honest and never steal," the locksmith said. "Another one percent will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television. And the rest will be honest as long as the conditions are right - but if they are tempted enough, they'll be dishonest too. Locks won't protect you from the thieves, who can get in your house if they really want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock".
-- Dan Ariely

#Doors #Long #People

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

#Mistake #Decision #Brain

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea — whether it’s about politics or sports — what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology — rigid and unyielding.
-- Dan Ariely

#Letting Go #Sports #Loss

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

#Football #Cheating #Motivation

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

#Giving Up #Procrastination #Long

If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools, and methods to help us make better decisions and improve our overall well-being? That's exactly the meaning of free lunches- the idea that there are tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire-pg. 241
-- Dan Ariely

#Mistake #Lunch #Ideas

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

#Life Changing #Decision #Important

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

#Firsts #Behavior

we usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves-than with reality
-- Dan Ariely

#Reality #Thinking #Views