predictably irrational

Nobody is doing more to add to our knowledge of the irrational side of human behavior than Dan Ariely. Not only does he conduct experiments that are elegant in their simplicity, but he writes about his work and that of other researchers in…

Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson does a deep dive into cognitive dissonance, a key driver of apparently irrational behavior.

A few days ago, I wrote about the power of the word "New" to get our attention - if there's a more potent attractor out there, it's almost certainly "FREE!" For years, advertising gurus have listed "free" on every compilation of…

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely does a great job of demolishing the idea that people make decisions in a rational manner. Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke, describes dozens of experiments that show how we procrastinate, when we…

Hot on the heels of learning that more expensive wine tastes better, we find that more expensive placebos are more effective at controlling pain: