Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions in Science and Inquiry

Dec 24, 2021 Rakan rated it it was ok

Shelves: science, society-and-gender

Even though I find the book very entertaining and the subject interesting, I believe that the book failed to deliver on what is promised on the cover page. Dan started his book with a strong statement that undermines economic theory but didn’t provide sound evidence to support his arguments. I can summarize my critique for him in three main points:

- Not well-established experiments: what Dan considers evidence or research are basically experiments done by himself when he was a student at Duke an Even though I find the book very entertaining and the subject interesting, I believe that the book failed to deliver on what is promised on the cover page. Dan started his book with a strong statement that undermines economic theory but didn’t provide sound evidence to support his arguments. I can summarize my critique for him in three main points:

- Not well-established experiments: what Dan considers evidence or research are basically experiments done by himself when he was a student at Duke and MIT which was not published or peer reviewed.

- Biased assumptions and generalization: in each chapter, the author would mention a phenomenon or site a research and then he would make generalizations and assumptions that would sound reasonable without backing them up by the same studies sited, from the dynamics of the relationship between men and women and the social norms that govern that to judging a social and economic system based on an interaction with an Iranian student.

- Weak and surface-level findings: although the author stumbled over interesting human behavior phenomenon, he gave simplistic reasoning and did not dive deeper into the processes behind the decisions and didn’t even bother to challenge himself.

- Confusion around definitions: the author clearly has some confusion when defining certain terms or words such as equating greed with dishonesty, or separating between the ideas of price anchoring and relativity although price anchoring is clearly under the idea of relativity that he defined.

- Not enough for a book: looking back at the different chapters, it seems that each one can be read as a standalone article or seminar, however as a whole the chapters’ ideas are not connected, in addition to that, few chapters are “richer” in content than others. It seems that the book was an afterthought, and later chapters are rushed.

- 2008 is a long time ago: the book was published in 2008 and probably written a year before that which is a totally different era. 13 years has passed, and many things have happened, a financial crisis, and the inception of social media platforms which enable researchers to better understand how consumers behave by providing data that have never been imagined before. I believe some of Dan’s ideas still hold true today, however, research show that human behavior is more complicated that what it seemed more than 10 years ago.
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