The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Dan Ariely
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“...[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.”
“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.”
“Upton Sinclair once noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)”
“...[T]he distance Boston drivers generally maintain from the car in front of them is visible only with a good microscope.”
“The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. Greater labor leads to greater love. Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it.”
“Man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything. —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY”
“I do believe that an improved understanding of the multiple irrational forces that influence us could be a useful first step toward making better decisions.”
“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”
“there is a great deal to be learned from rational economics, but some of its assumptions—that people always make the best decisions, that mistakes are less likely when the decisions involve a lot of money, and that the market is self-correcting—can clearly lead to disastrous consequences.”
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Book Keywords:
human, human-behavior, business, funny-and-random, boston-driving, wok, motivation, economics, mind