The Irrational Bundle Quotes

“You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“honesty, transparency, conscientiousness, and fair dealing should be bedrock corporate principles.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“A number of wise men have warned us against the would-be benefits of vengeance. Mark Twain said, “Therein lies the defect of revenge: it’s all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.” Walter Weckler further observed that “revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst.” And Albert Schweitzer noted that “Revenge . . . is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“four principles of human endeavor: • The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. • Greater labor leads to greater love. • Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. • When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“We may not always know exactly why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel. But the obscurity of our real motivations doesn’t stop us from creating perfectly logical-sounding reasons for our actions, decisions, and feelings.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“As it turns out, we are caring social animals, but when the rules of the game involve money, this tendency is muted.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“our irrationality happens the same way, again and again. Whether we are acting as consumers, businesspeople, or policy makers, understanding how we are predictably irrational provides a starting point for improving our decision making and changing the way we live for the better.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“There’s one way to find out if a man is honest—ask him. If he says “yes,” he is a crook. —GROUCHO MARX”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“After all, we are more than the sum of our parts (with a few exceptions, of course).”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“if we do nothing while we are feeling an emotion, there is no short- or long-term harm that can come to us. However, if we react to the emotion by making a DECISION, we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may also create a long-lasting pattern of DECISIONS that will continue to misguide us for a long time.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the “toothbrush theory.” The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else’s.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“Sadly, most of us often prefer immediately gratifying short-term experiences over our long-term objectives.* We routinely behave as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired or stressed.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“every year, employees’ theft and fraud at the workplace are estimated at about $600 billion.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“He worked diligently to separate Starbucks from other coffee shops, not through price but through ambience.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“I invited a few bright students to help us understand the degree to which rational, intelligent people can predict how their attitudes will change when they are in an impassioned state. In order to make this study realistic, we needed to measure the participants’ responses while they were smack in the midst of such an emotional state. We could have made our participants feel angry or hungry, frustrated or annoyed. But we preferred to have them experience a pleasurable emotion.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“America’s top killer isn’t cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obesity. It’s our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviors.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“The Hedonic Treadmill By failing to anticipate the extent of our hedonic adaptation, as consumers we routinely escalate our purchases, hoping that new stuff will make us happier.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“We routinely behave as if sometime in the future, we will have more time, more money, and feel less tired or stressed.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“A few years ago, for instance, the AARP asked some lawyers if they would offer less expensive services to needy retirees, at something like $30 an hour. The lawyers said no. Then the program manager from AARP had a brilliant idea: he asked the lawyers if they would offer free services to needy retirees. Overwhelmingly, the lawyers said yes.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“participants to choose the sheet that tempted them to cheat. As a result of their depletion, they suffered a double whammy: they picked the premarked bubble sheet more frequently, and (as we saw in the previous experiment) they also cheated more when cheating was possible. When we looked at these two ways of cheating combined, we found that we paid the depleted participants 197 percent more than those who were not depleted. Depletion in Everyday Life Imagine you’re on a protein-and-vegetable diet and you go grocery shopping at the end of the day. You enter the supermarket,”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“How long did these two tasks take you? If you are like most of our participants, reading the congruent”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“would be printed in green ink, and the participants were asked to say “green”).”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“THE FINAL LESSON is this: both in canoes and in life, it behooves us to give ourselves time to cool off before we DECIDE to take any action. If we don’t, our DECISION might just crash into the future. And finally, should you ever think about scheduling a makeup session on top of mine, remember how I DECIDED to respond last time. I am not saying I would do it again, but when emotions take over, who knows?”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“labor begets love.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“Contrafreeloading,” a term coined by the animal psychologist Glen Jensen, refers to the finding that many animals prefer to earn food rather than simply eating identical but freely accessible food.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty