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

by Dan Ariely

To set the stage for the competition between these two approaches, we organized a speed-dating event like the one described in chapter 7, “Hot or Not?” In our experimental speed-dating event, participants had an opportunity to meet face-to-face with a number of people, including the person they’d met in the virtual world and the person they’d met in our standard online dating scenario. Our speed-dating event differed slightly from the standard experience in another way, too. After each four-minute interaction at the tables, participants answered the following questions about the person they had just met: How much do you like this person? How similar do you think you are to this person? How exciting do you find this person? How comfortable do you feel with this person? Our participants scored each question on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 meant “not at all” and 10 meant “very.” As is usual in speed-dating events, we also asked them to tell us whether they were interested in meeting the person again in the future.