42 of Dan Ariely's Best Quotes
When it comes to understanding why we do the things we do, Dan Ariely is a master of the game.
Dan is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight.
He is the author of the bestsellers: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Irrationally Yours, Payoff, Dollars and Sense, Amazing Decisions and Misbelief.
His work has been featured in leading scholarly journals and various popular media outlets, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, and Science.
Dan has spent his career unravelling the quirks of our decision-making, and his work offers insights anyone can understand and apply. He explains everything from why we struggle to make good choices in the short term to why we are our own worst enemies when it comes to money.
In this post, we’ve gathered 42 of Ariely’s most thought-provoking quotes. Hopefully, these nuggets of wisdom will inspire and challenge you.
1. “Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”
2. “Think about the cookie. The cookie is a weaponised food, that makes us want one, and then another, and another.”
3. “We all think that in the future, we are wonderful people. We will be patient, we will not procrastinate, we will exercise, we will eat well... The problem is we never get to live in that future. We always live in the present.”
4. “Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery.”
5. “Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?”
6. “Placebo comes from the Latin for "I shall please." The term was used in the fourteenth century to refer to sham mourners who were hired to wail and sob for the deceased at funerals.”
7. “You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it's not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.”
8. “Happiness too often seems to be less a reflection of our actual happiness and more a reflection of the ways in which we compare ourselves to others.”
9. “Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.”
10. “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.”
11. “Your immediate environment is comprised of coffee shops, supermarkets, websites, apps and all kinds of things – none of which have an interest in your long-term or short-term financial well-being.”
12. “It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches!”
13. “Fundamentally, when we value effort over outcome, we’re paying for incompetence.”
14. “Thoreau wrote, “Simplify! Simplify!” And, indeed, simplification is one mark of real genius.”
15. “We all want explanations for why things happen, and we often look to find those explanations in meaningful stories.”
16. “We all want to be good, but it's so much easier to be bad.”
17. “Free is a strange price, and yes, it is a price.”
18. “Which would you buy? A dress shirt priced at $60 or the very same dress shirt, priced at $100, but “On Sale! 40% off! Only $60!”?”
19. “Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.”
20. “In terms of the actual curriculum for management education, my own view is very simple-minded: The world is incredibly complex, it changes all the time, and we should not even hope that we could create a general model that accurately describes the world in all its possible states.”
21. “One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we’re in.”
22. “We are highly influenced by social norms and the behavior of others around us.”
23. “Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you’re not prepared for that, it’s going to be really terrible.””
24. “As soon as we start making comparisons, our satisfaction changes.”
25. “We tend to overvalue the things we already own, even if their actual worth is minimal.”
26. “The first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent.”
27. “Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant.”
28. “In general, we are often overly focused on endings when we evaluate overall experiences. From this perspective, a cake at the end of a meal is of particular importance.”
29. “We often underestimate the power of small actions and their cumulative impact over time.”
30. “Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else.”
31. “With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.”
32. “We can't rely solely on our willpower to make positive changes; we need to design our environments to support our goals.”
33. “We usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves, than with reality.”
34. “By failing to anticipate the extent of our hedonic adaptation, as consumers we routinely escalate our purchases, hoping that new stuff will make us happier.”
35. “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.”
36. “We are not perfectly rational; we all have biases and blind spots that shape our decisions.”
37. “The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy.”
38. “We are in an environment that is ever more hostile to making thoughtful, well-reasoned, rational decisions.”
39. “A stereotype, after all, is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of predicting experiences. The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation.”
40. “Our intuition about the future is flat-out bad.”
41. “Anticipation can greatly impact our enjoyment of an experience.”
42. “We are driven by our desire to avoid losses more than our desire to achieve gains.”
Want to hear more from Dan?
Register now for his upcoming course, Behavioural Science for Life, which will teach you how to improve your decision-making, motivate yourself to reach your goals, make better financial decisions, become a better communicator, increase your productivity, have better relationships and more!
You will not be disappointed.
