Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions in LessWrong

Apr 20, 2015 Vlad Sitalo rated it really liked it

Shelves: cognition, rationality, science, non-fiction, psychology, economics, decision-making, audiobook

I've read "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman and now I'm reading my way through LessWrong sequences, so overall I havent got a lot of new information here. But there were different and sometimes more detailed and colorful overviews of some issues and writing style is quite good too. So I've actually really enjoyed this one.

Particularly I've enjoyed the part with detailed exploration of possibilities to setting up influences in a way to achieve your long term goals despite the fact that ...more

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May 13, 2016 Bruno rated it liked it

Shelves: critical-thinking, psychology

This compilation of social experiments done by the author and his peers at MIT was entertaining until the second half. Some effects surprised me, and made me think how many times I've sinned on the grounds of irrationality. However, some of the mentioned psychological biases were just plain obvious, and I don't see how these would work with people other than very compulsive, naïve customers. And then, all of a sudden, the effects by the end of the book just felt like subtle variations of the fir ...more

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Dec 31, 2019 Matthias rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: behavioral-and-cognitive-sciences, read-2015-2019, 2000s

The book consists in a long string of explained experiments in the behavioral economics field, divided by macro-category, and commented in a "pop" way (for the masses).

There are two problems with the book, in my opinion:

1. The science is not always that strong. At a certain point, Ariely explains and proceeds to draw conclusions from a study saying "Asian women performed worse on a math test when primed to think about their female identity, but better when they were primed to think about their A The book consists in a long string of explained experiments in the behavioral economics field, divided by macro-category, and commented in a "pop" way (for the masses).

There are two problems with the book, in my opinion:

1. The science is not always that strong. At a certain point, Ariely explains and proceeds to draw conclusions from a study saying "Asian women performed worse on a math test when primed to think about their female identity, but better when they were primed to think about their Asian identity". This study was conducted in 1999, and by the time the book was published in 2008, it had never been replicated, not even once (it happened only in 2015, with two results with opposite effects). This is just an example, that I managed to spot because I already knew it, but who knows how many of these cases are disseminated in the book? One thing's for sure, a bit too many of the experiments Ariely chose to talk about are related to Priming, which has shaky grounds, as Kahneman himself confirmed.

2. There isn't really a unifying soul to this series of chapters here, unlike in Kahneman's book. Ariely proceeds to explain experiment after experiment, and sometimes draws general conclusions. Even if he tries to insert stories and to sound entertaining, the format can become tedious towards the end of the book. Another problem is that sometimes he wears the "prescriptive social scientist" hat, which is already a delicate and problematic thing to do in itself, to expose some quite subjective ideas, not exactly logically following from the experiments' results. The clearest and worst example of this is his take on the "market vs. social" duality: he seems to forget or ignore economic progress flourishes exactly in the cultures where economies leave behind the relationship-based model and evolve to the market-based model as often as possible; cherry on top, he even seems to enthusiastically advocate for corporate-driven psychological manipulation of the workers to give them some doubtful, fabricated "sense of meaning" (see also my review of Payoff on this point). When compared to the actual conditions and results of the single experiments, many of the inferred implications and prescriptions sound like a stretch, and much more subjective than objective.

All in all, even if this book contributed to make the field of behavioral economics popular, and paved the way for the success of Kahneman's book among the masses, it's not the strongest you can find on the subject.
I'd suggest to directly go check the much longer, but also much superior Thinking, Fast and Slow instead. ...more

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Aug 05, 2015 Adam Zerner rated it really liked it

Solid book. I'm someone who knows a pretty good amount about human psychology and biases, so it was a lot of review for me, but still, I better internalized a bunch of different concepts. ...more

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