Teaser Tuesdays -- AKA Dan Ariely rocks

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Miz B of Should Be Reading and asks you to :


1. Grab your current read

2. Open to a random page

3 . Share 2 "teaser" sentences also citing the title of the book and the author and in that way people can have great recommendations if they like the "teaser".

4. Please avoid spoilers!

 "Could all this mean that sometimes we might actually behave less rationally when we try harder?  If that's so, what is the correct way to pay people without overstressing them? "
p. 51, The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely


The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely

First off, you should all know that I adore Dan Ariely. His first book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, totally rocked my world.  Ariely is a behavioral economist who teaches at Duke. One should be able to read a book on behavioral economics in bed without laughing and/or snorting aloud while needing to say to your family members every five minutes,"Okay, I know the light is out, I'm reading with a flashlight, and your eyes are closed, but just listen to this part."  Do not expect to be able to do this with any book written by Dan Ariely.  After reading Predictably Irrational I decided that if I ever went back to school I'd get a degree in behavioral economics this time. I don't know if I could really hack it or not, but Dan Ariely makes the entire field absolutely fascinating!


I knew very little about behavioral economics before encountering Ariely's work. In his words, behavioral economists "don't assume that people are perfectly sensible, calculating machines. Instead, we observe how people actually behave, and quite often our observations lead us to the conclusion that human beings are irrational" (page 6). Ariely adds that the goal of behavioral economics is "to try to understand the way we really operate so we can more readily observe our biases, be more aware of their influences on us, and hopefully make better decisions" (page 9).

Ariely includes an interesting side-bar about what motivates people to blog that would interest my fellow bloggers.  I certainly agree that I love to read comments on my own blog and I've heard many of you say the same.

I could clearly gush about this book forever.  I'll let you all admire my restraint as I simply say that if you are in the market for a new non-fiction read, this is it!