Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely
Dan Arielyis the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics. He teaches at Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and also the co-founder of BEworks. Ariely's talks on TED have been watched over 7.8 million times. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best sellers, as well as The Honest Truth about Dishonesty...
NationalityIsraeli
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth29 April 1967
CountryIsrael
Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.
One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.
Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.
It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.
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.
Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.
We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.
None of us always make the best financial decisions.
Companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees.
Your immediate environment is comprised of coffee shops, supermarkets, websites, apps and all kinds of things - none of which have an interest in your long-term or short-term financial well-being.
The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.
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.
Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don't want to be honest all the time.
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.