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It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.

Dan Ariely

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Dan Ariely
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 29
Economist
Pedagogue
Professor
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Really
Realize
Biases
Make
Realizing
Array
Life
Decision
Susceptible
Like
Bigs
Formidable
Difficult
Visit
Often
Admit
Come
Changing
Important
Decisions

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For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively.
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The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.
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It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating - on our taxes or on the football field.
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Once we start thinking of ourselves as polluted, there is not much incentive to behave well, and the trip down the slippery slope is likely.
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The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.
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When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.
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When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations … we could design a better world.
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If you ever go bar hopping, who do you want to take with you? You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. Similar ... but slightly uglier.
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Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.
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that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.
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You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it's not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.
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I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. We're less productive as individuals. We're less productive as companies, and we're more miserable.
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But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?
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We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception.
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We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.
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Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time.
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It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.
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Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we've done so far, what mistakes we've made, and what improvements should come next.
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One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.
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