The Upside of Irrationality
The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
International Bestselling author
Dan Ariely
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010
© Dan Ariely 2010
Dan Ariely asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007354795
Version 2016-11-25
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To my teachers, collaborators, and students, for making research fun and exciting.
And to all the participants who took part in our experiments over the years—you are the engine of this research, and I am deeply grateful for all your help.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION Lessons from Procrastination and Medical Side Effects
Part I THE UNEXPECTED WAYS WE DEFY LOGIC AT WORK
CHAPTER 1 Paying More for Less
CHAPTER 2 The Meaning of Labor
CHAPTER 4 The Not-Invented-Here Bias
CHAPTER 5 The Case for Revenge
Part II THE UNEXPECTED WAYS WE DEFY LOGIC AT HOME
CHAPTER 9 On Empathy and Emotion
CHAPTER 10 The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions
CHAPTER 11 Lessons from Our Irrationalities
Bibliography and Additional Readings
INTRODUCTION Lessons from Procrastination and Medical Side Effects
I don’t know about you, but I have never met anyone who never procrastinates. Delaying annoying tasks is a nearly universal problem—one that is incredibly hard to curb, no matter how hard we try to exert our willpower and self-control or how many times we resolve to reform.
Allow me to share a personal story about one way I learned to deal with my own tendency to procrastinate. Many years ago I experienced a devastating accident. A large magnesium flare exploded next to me and left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns (an experience I wrote about in Predictably Irrational*). As if to add insult to injury, I acquired hepatitis from an infected blood transfusion after three weeks in the hospital. Obviously, there is never a good time to get a virulent liver disease, but the timing of its onset was particularly unfortunate because I was already in such bad shape. The disease increased the risk of complications, delayed my treatment, and caused my body to reject many skin transplants. To make matters worse, the doctors didn’t know what type of liver disease I had. They knew I wasn’t suffering from hepatitis A or B, but they couldn’t identify the strain. After a while the illness subsided, but it still slowed my recovery by flaring up from time to time and wreaking havoc on my system.
Eight years later, when I was in graduate school, a flare-up hit me hard. I checked into the student health center, and after many blood tests the doctor gave me a diagnosis: it was hepatitis C, which had recently been isolated and identified. As lousy as I felt, I greeted this as good news. First, I finally knew what I had; second, a promising new experimental drug called interferon looked as if it might be an effective treatment for hepatitis C. The doctor asked whether I’d consider being part of an experimental study to test the efficacy of interferon. Given the threats of liver fibrosis and cirrhosis and the possibility of early death, it seemed that being part of the study was clearly the preferred path.
The initial protocol called for self-injections