Still, Arierly makes two significant points.DWill wrote: And in fact, you're right--people aren't that simplistic. The most important fact to emphasize about the experiments that Ariely summarizes might be that still, a great number of people go against the trend he identifies. What I'm trying to say is that when a result is statistically significant, that only means that enough of the subjects have followed the trend that we can say the effect is real and not due to chance. But the effect doesn't show up in 100% of the subjects, not even close. This means that there isn't a determinism is in the forces Ariely describes, only that because the effects are really there for a large enough percentage of people at a given time, we will notice the effect on society as a whole.
First, nobody's decision-making process is rational. Everyone makes irrational decision at least some of the time.
Second, the ways in which people are irrationale follow certain patterns. While there's variation in how different people react to a given situation, the commonalities are significant and interesting.
The rest of the book, which i read two years ago, goes into more detail about those patterns of irrationality.
