Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

by Dan Ariely

unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose—once a social norm is trumped by a market norm—it will rarely return.

I used to think that giving cash a gift to someone is a better idea than a proper gift. I think i now understand why people still value the physical gift more than cash. Similarly, don't bribe you kids to make them do certain things. Try to make them understand the thing using reason and emotion. Once they start doing things for bribes, they might now react positively to reason in any other situation.

The first quirk, as we saw in the case of the basketball tickets, is that we fall in love with what we already have.

I am a programmer and i see this in my professional world all the time. People know a certain way of doing things or a certain technology and defend it in super irrational ways. The moment you ask them the second level question, things fall apart. They then defend what they know with raw emotion (anger and frustration at the question). This is one thing i look out for in colleagues now and get closer to ones who can let go of their beliefs when presented with a better option.