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We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception.

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
Need
Needs
Believe
Good
People
Maintain
Perception
Anything

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The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy.
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Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.
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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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What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you're creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.
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People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.
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Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn't be a professor if there wasn't any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism.
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Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don't want to be honest all the time.
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Linking financial element to energy consumption I think has a huge role if you think about a display instrument that could teach us about what we are using, how much it costs us, how much it is saving, and therefore change our decisions.
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The real issue is, how much goodwill do you invest in the work? And goodwill is not something that we can buy with money. It's very hard to buy goodwill with money.
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Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be really terrible.
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The companies that provide debt, what do you think their goal is? Is their goal for you to fully understand the cost of your debt? No. So they're basically creating these approaches to make you feel like it is incredibly cheap or just to think about the cost per day rather the cost per year or cost for a lifetime. So debt is very simple mistake.
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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.
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If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.
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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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A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.
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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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While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.
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When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.
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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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In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.
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