Forțele ascunse care ne influențează deciziile

Da, dragilor, m-am întors, dar despre asta, altă dată, căci nu dispun de mult timp pentru a vă povesti. Despre ce vreau musai să scriu, totuși, înainte să duc cartea la bibliotecă, este despre cum suntem noi previzibili în mod irațional. Sună interesant ? 😛 Citiți mai departe.

Titlu: Predictably Irrational – The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Autor: Dan Ariely – american-israelian

Despre ce e vorba: Dacă în teoria economică auzim deseori structura ”consumator rațional”, ei bine, Dan Ariely demonstrează prin banale experimente că lucrurile nu stau chiar așa. Povestindu-și tragica experiență cu accidentul în urma căruia s-a ales cu numeroase arsuri grave, dar și cu ideea cărții de față, Dan trece la studii asupra diverselor comportamente umane. Ceea ce face el se numește ”economie comportamentală”. Se pun astfel la îndoială deciziile noastre de zi cu zi, dar nu numai atât, ci se oferă și soluții. Pentru că acesta e scopul cărții, în fond: să atragă atenția asupra comportamentelor noastre greșite, dar repetate, și să ne facă să nu mai acționăm astfel, tot înspre propriul bine.

Opinie personală: De obicei nu citesc cărți de ”dezvoltare personală” și de-astea, DAR trebuie să recunosc că această carte m-a cucerit în secunda 2 prin dezinvoltura și sinceritatea autorului, precum și prin faptul că faptele și ideile sunt prezentate în mod simplu, ușor de înțeles pentru toată lumea. Chiar i-am găsit utilitatea și clar a trecut în topul cărților non-beletristică pe care le-am citit vreodată. V-o recomand cu cea mai mare plăcere, mai ales în limba engleză, cum am citit-o și eu. Autorul are și site unde scrie diverse, tot despre câmpul acesta al economiei comportamentale, dacă vă interesează: danariely.com. După cum vorbește și după seriile de fotografii vă puteți da ușor seama că e un om tare interesant și dezinhibat. 🙂 Citatele de mai jos sunt extrase din cartea în engleză, însă avem cartea publicată și în română prin librării. Eu nu le-am modificat, le-am lăsat așa. Sper să vă trezească interesul, le-am selectat astfel încât să fie cât mai relevante. 🙂

Citate:
„But let’s take a look at the decoy effect in a completely different situation. What if you are single, and hope to appeal to as many attractive potential dating partners as possible at an upcoming singles event ? My advice would be to bring a friend who has your basic physical characteristics ( similar coloring, body type, facial features ), but is slightly less attractive (-you ).
Why ? Because the folks you want to attract will have a hard time evaluating you with no comparables around. However, if you are compared if you are compared with a „-you”, the decoy friend will do a lot to make you look better, not just in comparison with the decoy, but also in general, and in comparison with all the other people around. It may sound irrational ( and i can’t guarantee this ), but the chances are good that you will get some extra attention. Of course, don’t just stop at looks. If great conversation will win the day, be sure to pick a friend for the singles event who can’t match your smooth delivery and rapier wit. By comparison, you’ll sound great.
Now that you know this secret, be careful: when a similar but better-looking friend of the same sex asks you to accompany him or her for a night out, you might wonder whether you have been invited along for your company or merely as a decoy.”

„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.”

„Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps it’s time to inventory the imprints and anchors in our own life. Even if they once were completely reasonable, are they still reasonable ? Once the old choices are reconsidered, we can open ourselves to new decisions – and the new opportunities of a new day. That seems to make sense.”

„A few years ago, they studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. Uri and Aldo concluded that the fine didn’t work well, and in fact it had long-term negative effects. Why ? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late-as they occasionally were-they felt guilty about it-and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. But once the fine was imposed, the day care center inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late. Needless to say, this was not what the day care center intended.

But the real story only started here. The most interesting part occurred a few weeks later, when the day care center removed the fine. Now the center was back to the social norm. Would the parents also return to the social norm ? Would their guilt return as well ? Not at all. Once the fine was removed, the behavior of the parents didn’t change. They continued to pick up their kids late. In fact, when the fine was removed, there was a slight increase in the number of tardy pickups ( after all, both the social norms and the fine had been removed ).
This experiment illustrates an unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose-once a social norm is trumped by a market norm-it will rarely return.”

„We are continually reminded that we can do anything and be anything we want to be. The problem is living up to this dream. We must develop ourselves in every way possible; must taste every aspect of life; must make sure that of the 1000 things to see before dying, we have not stopped at number 999. But then comes a problem-are we spreading ourselves too thin ?
Running from door to door is a strange enough human activity. But even stranger is our compulsion to chase after doors of little worth-opportunities that are nearly dead, or that hold little interest for us. (…)
Similarly, how many times have we bought something on sale not because we really needed it but because by the end of the sale all of those items would be gone, and we could never have it at that price again?”
(…)
But the bigger doors ( or those that seem bigger ) are harder to close. Doors that just might lead to a new career or to a better job might be hard to close. Doors that are tied to our dreams are also hard to close. So are relationships with certain people-even if they seem to be going nowhere.

We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open. It’s just the way we’re wired. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to close them. Think about a fictional episode: Rhett Butler leaving Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, in the scene where Scarlett clings to him and begs him, „Where shall i go ? What shall i do ?” Rhett, after enduring too much from Scarlett and finally having his fill of it, says, „Frankly, my dear, i don’t give a damn.” It’s not by chance that this line has been voted the most memorable in cinematographic history. It’s the emphatic closing of a door that gives it widespread appeal. And it should be a reminder to all of us that we have doors-little and big ones-which we ought to shut.”

„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 behavioural economics, an emerging field focused on the ( quite intuitive ) idea that people do not always behave rationally and that they often make mistakes in their decisions.”