Dan Ariely Quotes & Sayings

I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point. — Dan Ariely

Every enticing item you pass in the window and don't buy is a crushed impulse, slowly whittling away at your reserve of willpower - making it much more likely that later in the day you will fall for temptation. — Dan Ariely

I don't think we should go around life and being miserable all the time and feel the pain of paying. It's a question of what categories we want to spend more on and what categories we want feel that we are spending too much on and we want to cut down. — Dan Ariely

Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else. — Dan Ariely

Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves. — Dan Ariely

Some special conpanies see trust as the pulic good. — Dan Ariely

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

Human beings are inherently social and trusting animals. — Dan Ariely

We usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves-than with reality — Dan Ariely

Money is a great way to get happiness. Right? Lots of wonderful things you can do with money. The question is, are we really optimizing on that? So, if you think about getting lattes and getting cable. Which one of those is actually giving you a greater happiness, and if you have to cut on one of those, which one would you cut? So, I think thinking in terms of concrete terms would help us a great deal. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was. — Dan Ariely

One that we are just beginning to understand- is that trust, once eroded, is very hard to restore. — Dan Ariely

We're actually trying to develop an iPhone app, now that the Droid is out, we'll do it for that as well, if we ever learn how to program on this thing. But the idea is that to make money concrete. So, you can do this app, and it's not out there, but you can do the app. And you say, "I like vacation in the Bahamas, shoes, lattes, and books." And now, when you are tempted to buy something, that thing translates in terms of the things you are interested in. — Dan Ariely

According to neuroscience research from 2012, it is intrinsically rewarding to talk about oneself. This is perhaps why Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms like Tumblr have been such successful products. — Dan Ariely

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea - whether it's about politics or sports - what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can't stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology - rigid and unyielding. — Dan Ariely

[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion. — Dan Ariely

Giving people favors is a time-honored way of gaining loyalty. Pharmaceutical reps do it. The salespeople manning cosmetic counters do it. Lobbyists do it. Men with big crushes on impossibly beautiful women do it. Gifts work on our feelings in a couple of ways: they change the way we experience something, and they push our "reciprocate!" button. When we have the mandate to be objective and an incentive not to be, our biases often win the day-even if we don't think they will. Favors deeply affect our preferences and our loyalties. — Dan Ariely

The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely. — Dan Ariely

Believing you are a bad person leads to a slippery slope. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

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

CEOs hired from the outside get paid more than those hired from the inside and that they don't perform as well. I suspect that the reason for this is the same heightened expectations that come with lack of knowledge - when someone is relatively unknown we tend to fill in the gaps in overoptimistic ways, — Dan Ariely

Wardrobing is buying an item of clothing, wearing it for a while, and then returning it in such a state that the store has to accept it but can no longer resell it. By engaging in wardrobing, consumers are not directly stealing money from the company; instead, it is a dance of buying and returning, with many unclear transactions involved. But there is at least one clear consequence - the clothing industry estimates that its annual losses from wardrobing are about $16 billion (about the same amount as the estimated annual loss from home burglaries and automobile theft combined). — Dan Ariely

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

Following imprinting, valuations become locally coherent, as the consumer attempts to reconcile future decisions of a "similar kind" with the initial one. This creates an illusion of order, because consumers' coherent responses to subsequent changes in conditions disguise the arbitrary nature of the initial, foundation choice. — Dan Ariely

religion attempts to influence our mind-set before we are tempted, by creating moral education and - let's not forget - guilt. — Dan Ariely

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

What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person's mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance. — Dan Ariely

We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions. — Dan Ariely

The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend. — Dan Ariely

We are all very good at rationalizing our actions so that they are in line with our selfish motives. — Dan Ariely

If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools, and methods to help us make better decisions and improve our overall well-being? That's exactly the meaning of free lunches- the idea that there are tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire-pg. 241 — Dan Ariely

One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in. — Dan Ariely

The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things. — Dan Ariely

The translation of joy into willingness to work seems to depend to a large degree on how much meaning we can attribute to our own labor. — Dan Ariely

We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things - our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better. — Dan Ariely

That when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. — Dan Ariely

One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors. — Dan Ariely

Could it be that we made arbitrary decisions at some point in the past (like the goslings that adopted Lorenz as their parent) and have built our lives on them ever since, assuming that the original decisions were wise? — Dan Ariely

introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult. — Dan Ariely

The first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent. — Dan Ariely

In terms of the actual curriculum for management education, my own view is very simple-minded: The world is incredibly complex, it changes all the time, and we should not even hope that we could create a general model that accurately describes the world in all its possible states. — Dan Ariely

This, then, is what we call arbitrary coherence. Initial prices are largely "arbitrary" and can be influenced by responses to random questions; but once those prices are established in our minds, they shape not only what we are willing to pay for an item, but also how much we are willing to pay for related products (this makes them coherent). — Dan Ariely

There are many examples to show that people will work more for a cause than for cash. — Dan Ariely

Question to ask them. I asked half the students to write down whether, hypothetically, they would be willing to pay me $10 for a 10-minute poetry recitation. I asked the other half to write down whether, hypothetically, they would be willing to listen to me recite poetry for ten minutes if I paid them $10. — Dan Ariely

Under the school's disclosure rules, about 1,600 of 8,900 professors and lecturers at Harvard Medical School have reported to the dean that they or a family member had a financial interest in a business related to their teaching, research, or clinical care.2 When professors publicly pass drug recommendations off as academic knowledge, we have a serious problem. — Dan Ariely

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

What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, "OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement." — Dan Ariely

Honesty, transparency, conscientiousness, and fair dealing should be bedrock corporate principles. — Dan Ariely

Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash. — Dan Ariely

People are irrational - and predictably so. — Dan Ariely

Recognizing our shortcomings is a crucial first step on the path to making better decisions, creating better societies, and fixing our institutions. — Dan Ariely

Kids don't care what party they have, right? They want cake and they want to run around. Nothing else matters. But in this escalation, all the kids want parties like their friends. So, if all the friends have an amazing, expensive party, they all want the same thing. If we all got to scale down as a coordinated effort, all the kids would have been just as happy. — Dan Ariely

If you have loans, the first thing you want to do is say, Okay, look I have a credit card, if I really need to borrow, I have this emergency money that I can get, but for now there is no reason for me to keep cash at zero percent interest rate and at the same time, pay all of this money out. So, I think people need to figure out quickly how to pay loans and how much cash they should really keep. — Dan Ariely

Money are very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota? — Dan Ariely

If you think of people as making decisions actively, every time we think about the cup of coffee, we say, How much will I enjoy the cup of coffee, what else could I not do in the future because I buy this cup of coffee? — Dan Ariely

The good news is that we can sometimes control the "circles" around us, moving toward smaller circles that boost our relative happiness. If we are at our class reunion, and there's a "big circle" in the middle of the room with a drink in his hand, boasting of his big salary, we can consciously take several steps away and talk with someone else. If we are thinking of buying a new house, we can be selective about the open houses we go to, skipping the houses that are above our means. If we are thinking about buying a new car, we can focus on the models that we can afford, and so on. We — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

When people think about a placebo such as the royal touch, they usually dismiss it as "just psychology." But, there is nothing "just" about the power of a placebo, and in reality it represents the amazing way our mind controls our body. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

There are basically two ways to help people get sufficient money to fund their entire retirement. The first is to get people to save more money, and to start saving at a younger age. The second approach is to get people to die at a younger age. The easier approach, by far, is getting people to die younger. And how might we achieve this? By allowing citizens to smoke. By subsidizing sugary and fatty foods. By limiting access to preventive health care etc. When we think about retirement savings in these terms, it seems that we're already doing the most we can on this front. — Dan Ariely

Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

Most of the time, according to the results of the study, Roy is smart, decent, reasonable, kind, and trustworthy. His frontal lobes are fully functioning, and he is in control of his behavior. But when he's in a state of sexual arousal and the reptilian brain takes over, he becomes unrecognizable to himself. — Dan Ariely

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

We found that the students with the three firm deadlines got the best grades; the class in which I set no deadlines at all (except for the final deadline) had the worst grades; and the class in which Gaurav and his classmates were allowed to choose their own three deadlines (but with penalties for failing to meet them) finished in the middle, in terms of their grades for the three papers and their final grade. — Dan Ariely

If companies want to benefit from the advantages of social norms, they need to do a better job of cultivating those norms. Medical benefits, and in particular comprehensive medical coverage, are among the best ways a company can express its side of the social exchange. But what are many companies doing? They are demanding high deductibles in their insurance plans, and at the same time are reducing the scope of benefits. Simply put, they are undermining the social contract between the company and the employees and replacing it with market norms. As companies tilt the board, and employees slide from social norms to the realm of market norms, can we blame them for jumping ship when a better offer appears? It's really no surprise that "corporate loyalty," in terms of the loyalty of employees to their companies, has become an oxymoron. — Dan Ariely

In running back and forth among the things that might be important, we forget to spend enough time on what really is important. — Dan Ariely

We don't really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor's, and they're going on vacation that's slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand. — Dan Ariely

We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. — Dan Ariely

It seems then that instead of consumers' willingness to pay influencing market prices, the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers' willingness to pay. — Dan Ariely

When people are in severe pain, there's an expression, you're a "pain person," and what that means is that nothing else matters. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

So we live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult. Once you've offered to pay for the delightful Thanksgiving dinner, your mother-in-law will remember the incident for years to come. And if you've ever offered a potential romantic partner the chance to cut to the chase, split the cost of the courting process, and simply go to bed, the odds are that you will have wrecked the romance forever. — Dan Ariely

Money actually becomes even more difficult than other things because it's very hard to imagine what the benefits are to saving. So, imagine that you see a new bicycle, a new pair of shoes, or something today. You know exactly what you are giving up if you are not buying it, what are you gaining in the future if you are not getting it. So, you are giving up the bicycle today, what is it in the future? What will happen if you send another $1,000 to your retirement fund? What difference will it make? It is very, very hard to figure out. — Dan Ariely

We all think that in the future, we are wonderful people. We will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will exercise, we will eat well ... The problem is we never get to live in that future. We always live in the present. — Dan Ariely

The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: although initial prices (such as the price of Assael's pearls) are "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds they will shape not only present prices but also future prices (this makes them "coherent"). — Dan Ariely

religions attempt to influence our mind-sets in the moment of temptation by incorporating different moral reminders into our environment. — Dan Ariely

What people do is they pay the small loans first. Why? Because they enjoy making the number of loans smaller. But of course it is a very ineffective way to pay debt down. — Dan Ariely

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

I don't want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it's very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset. — Dan Ariely

(Giving your mother-in-law a gift is a good idea, but paying her for a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner is not recommended, even if both gestures would cost you the same amount of money.) — Dan Ariely

The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we'll get. — Dan Ariely

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. — Dan Ariely

But, as the results presented in this book (and others) show, 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. So wouldn't it make sense to modify standard economics and move away from naive psychology, which often fails the tests of reason, introspection, and-most important-empirical scrutiny?

Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave? As I said in the Introduction, that simple idea is the basis of behavioral economics, an emerging field focused on the (quite intrusive) idea that people do not always behave rationally and that they often make mistakes in their decisions. — Dan Ariely

People choose to work more if they do it for free or if well-compensated but not if it is compensated with a little money. — Dan Ariely

Could it be that the potential to make something perfect increases our motivation? And could it be that when we are limited to just fixing something, our motivation is weakened? I suspect that this is the case, which means that maybe we should all start picking projects that are smaller, and more self-contained. — Dan Ariely

That's a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity. — Dan Ariely

Without constant suspicion, we can get more out of our exchanges with others while spending less time making sure that others will fulfill their promise to us. — Dan Ariely

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

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. — Dan Ariely

It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches! — Dan Ariely

Who would you trust right now? Which bank would you trust? Which investment would you trust? Do you really want to put your money; do you want to suffer more of these losses that we just had? You know, these volatility that we see is just unexplainable by any rational standards. Nobody has any clue about how to explain this, and nobody wants to experience that. So, we hold more money back, we don't necessarily want to invest in the market and by default, people are saving more. — Dan Ariely

In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. — Dan Ariely

A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its "resting state" in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over time. — Dan Ariely