Human Irrationality- Our Distance from Perfection
Few years ago, when I was reading about how to overcome difficult situations and stress, one of the key points which helped me was dealing with “Victim Mindset”. I realized that when we are upset, we easily go into this mindset where we think people have wronged us and we are stuck. To overcome this mindset, we need to own our decisions. We need to tell ourselves that I made this decision, I behaved in a certain way to be in this situation. Once we are out of this Victim mindset, we can see a path to come out of that difficult situation. I applied this method several times in the past and I have talked about this with several friends who were going through personal trouble.
Reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational opened up many questions in my mind. If we need to own our Decisions to not fall into Victim mind set trap, we need to believe that our decisions were rational. But what if most often our decisions are not rational.
As the author says “Recognizing where we depart from the ideal is an important part of the quest to truly understand ourselves”
The good news is that we are not just irrational, we are predictably irrational. This gives us hope and chance to improve our decision making process. The author explains several situations and how we think and react in those situations. My favorite part of the book are his experiments which helps us understand human behavior in these situations.
I personally find that concepts that he explained in the book are helpful for us to improve our day to day decision making and also useful in Business world.
In our everyday life we go out, we see advertisements, we see Insta influencers reviewing stuff which we didn't know existed or which we never thought we needed. Once you pay attention for a few seconds to such reviews or click the links, you start seeing more and more content about these stuff in your feed. This is not new. We all know how targeted content marketing works. Why do these targeted marketing work? In spite of knowing that we are being targeted, we still sometimes cant stop buying those stuff. Its very difficult to control that impulse buy. As the author says “ Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in a context”.
In most of online shopping websites, we notice that there are product comparisons in built. Once you select a product, websites like Amazon, automatically compares it with other similar items. Is this making us buy items with higher specifications than what we need? After reading this book, my answer would be Yes. Are we being manipulated to buy something we don't need ? I would like to believe that this feature was put there to make better decisions and not to manipulate me. The idea of being manipulated at every website I visit or every place I go is scary. But we need to be aware of this possibility. Being aware of how our brain is making such decisions is one step closer to not falling for these traps.
Another important topic which the author covered and makes sense is about Market Norms. We have all seen or heard stories where families fight, relationships break, friends become enemies due to money. The author has beautifully explained the difference between “Social Norms and Market Norms”. When they collide, how Social Norms go away for a long time and social relationships are not easy to reestablish. It remains as a scar in everyone’s mind. Seeing how some of the families around me broke due to money and relationships stained forever, made me in particular very cautious about this topic. Understanding the relationship between both would definitely help balance these two .These two norms co exist in our society and we need both these norms to function. If we lose Social norms, we will not be able to function as a society. Recent times, we can see Market norms are gradually taking over our lives. It would be good to rethink how to bring back some of the good old social norms back into our lives.
Study of Human brain and behavior is a fascinating subject. This book talks about different situations and how we make decisions in those situations. I almost felt bad that the book is over. I am sure anyone who reads this book will definitely have moments where they think about how they made certain decisions in their life. As the author says “We are limited by the tools nature has given us, and the natural way in which we make decisions is limited by the quality and accuracy of the tools”
Dan Ariely gives us hope that although irrationality is common on our decision making process, we can try to be more vigilant and force ourselves to think differently. We can revise our policies, environment, products, technology to make better decisions.
If you are someone who is interested in Human behavior go pick up this one immediately. Be careful, I have already built up your expectation about this book. The Mind gets what it expects!
