The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

by Dan Ariely

So we decided on a different approach. We took the medical files of our forty participants and showed them to a doctor, two nurses, and a physical therapist at the rehabilitation hospital where Hanan and I had spent so much time. We asked them to split the sample into two groups, the mildly injured and the more grievously injured. Once that was done, Hanan and I had two groups that were relatively similar to each other in many respects (all participants had been in the army, injured, and hospitalized, and were part of the same veterans country club) but differed in the severity of their injuries. By comparing these two groups, we hoped to see if the severity of our participants’ injuries influenced the way they experienced pain many years later. The severely injured group was made up of people like Noam, whose army job had been to disassemble land mines. At some unfortunate point, a land mine had exploded in his hands, piercing his body with numerous shrapnel wounds and costing him a leg and the sight in one eye. In the mildly injured group were men like Yehuda, who had broken his elbow while on duty. He had undergone an operation that had involved restoring the joint by adding a titanium plate, but he was otherwise in good health. The participants who had been mildly injured reported that the hot water became painful (pain threshold) after about 4.5 seconds, while those who had been severely injured started feeling pain after 10 seconds. More interestingly, those in the m...