Irrationality
17 Apr 2018 | ReadingI finished another book - Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality - and finished digitizing my notes. There’s a lot of great stuff in the book, both things that feel intuitive because of personal experiences and heuristics as well as things that are non-intuitive but proven through experiments and data.
There were two chapters that stood out for me personally. Chapter 6 - On Adaptation was about hedonistic adaptation. Just as our bodies are able to physically adapt, our minds are able to adapt to our environment and experiences. This applies to both negative and positive experiences. It’s why we feel compelled to “keep up with the Joneses”. Thing that we anticipate will increase our happiness are eventually adapted to so that we are again at our baseline levels of happiness. We adapt to life changes that seem catastrophic, and eventually have a new baseline for happiness in that situation as well. How do we utilize this knowledge to our benefit? Plow through the annoying tasks so that we adapt to them and they seem less bad. Conversely, interrupt your happy experiences so that you don’t adapt and your elevated level of happiness is prolonged.
Chapter 10 - The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions described a series of experiments that showed how our emotions influence our decisions long after those emotions have faded. Merely experiencing emotions through watching movie/tv clips and then recalling a time in your own life when you experienced something similar was enough to make a difference in behavior. Once we make the decision to behave a certain way, it becomes part of how we see ourselves and then influences our future behavior. This resonated a lot with me, but I’d have to devote more time to it if I want to write about why.
Next up I’m reading a book called Organize Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jason Selk and Tom Bartow. Thinking Fast and Slow is the one I should be reading as it’s constantly mentioned as the book about behavioral economics but it’s also really thick. -__-‘ A problematic aspect of reading all these behavioral economics books is that it’s hard to know which studies and claims actually hold up to scrutiny and which don’t. I’ve seen a lot of mentions of questionable studies, failed replication, and leaps of logic within the field but no mention of a better alternative. While reading something that requires you to be open to challenging your beliefs, I find it hard to maintain a critical mind (especially as a non-expert in this field).
Just gonna throw these links here for future reference: