** spoiler alert ** Another pop-psych book. I need to stop reading these. They all cite the same studies. This would be a good place to start if you haven't read a book like this before.


Quotes:

"Tom had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."

"Traditional economics assumes that prices of products in the market are determined by a balance between two forces: production at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). The price at which these two forces meet determines the prices in the marketplace. This is an elegant idea, but it depends centrally on the assumption that the two forces are independent and that together they produce the market price."

"The master calmly replied that if he charged them, they would not be able to afford him."

"So we live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationship."

"When social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time."

"Cheating is a lot easier when it's a step removed from money."

"The difference was not the cost of the item, or the fear of getting caught, but people's ability to justify the item to themselves as a legitimate use of their expense account."

"We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with out desires - with how we want to view ourselves - than with reality."