Book Review - The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic by by Dan Ariely

Rating - 4.5/5

A fantastic psychology book backed by legitimate experiments!!!

The most useful thing I got from this book, which I can relate as well:

Be REALLY careful when making decisions/taking actions in a heightened emotional state. Not only do our decisions affect things immediately, but what we decide to do sets a personal precedent that we tend to blindly follow in the future, having forgotten our previous emotional state and thus the motivation for the original decision

Another good read from Dr. Ariely; I thoroughly enjoyed Ariely's previous book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, and this book is an excellent sequel to it as well. There are many "pop-psychology" books on the market these days, but one thing sets this book off from the rest - rather than simply reporting on the research of others, the author himself conducted the many psychology experiments described in his book. This gives the book an aura of authenticity and originality, because it describes research in the first person. The author clearly describes the motivations behind his experiments. The experiments, he describes, have such an elegance they feel like solutions to Sherlock Holmes tales. Often though the conclusions drawn have a "yeah I sort of knew that" quality of common sense about them and lack the punch of the conclusions he could draw from experimentation in the first book.

Reading this book was kind of like sitting in a social psychology class, drinking in all of the information without having to show up for class. The author includes his own dose of humor and is brave enough to disclose how some of his discoveries put his own injuries into perspective. Ariely was badly burned as a teenager and spent 3 years hospitalized and in intense therapy.  

As a human being, we definitely can't expect ourselves to make a hundred percent rational decisions. Our decisions are shaped by our emotions. Because of herding effect, our current decisions influence our future decisions too, like a communication pattern in a family. Once a good/bad communication starts, it's more likely to be the future communication patterns.

I always claim that I make Rational Decisions most of the times (being technically correct 😜). Ariely has a knack for making me reevaluate how I act and consider things. After Predictably Irrational left me in awe, The Upside of Irrationality comes to confirm that Ariely is a top-notch social scientist and is worthy of being revered as such. This book was so engaging that I abandoned the fiction book I was reading almost entirely, to keep reading this. And when you consider how freaking educational it is, on top of being ridiculously engaging, it's an all-around win for me.

Since long I wanted to add a review for this book chapter-wise so that I could look up later. Each chapter in this irresistible book takes a fascinating look at the irrational forces that move us away from Spock and more towards Homer.

Dan Ariely has divided the books into two broad parts:
Part 1- The unexpected way we defy logic at work and Part 2- The unexpected way we defy logic at home. Each part has five chapters covering five different areas where so called rational human being behaves irrationally.

Part 1 - Work-related Irrationalities

1. Big Bonuses don't work. (Which means high CEO salaries aren't quite logical.) Oh, but this is no way the bad news for your rewards and recognition program. Bonuses and reward should be just right, not too less that people do not care and not too much that enormity of reward at stake scares your people into failure.
2. Even though all of us work for a salary to make a living. But we all like to find some meaning in work. For example, if you are a writer who was paid well to research and complete the book, but if for some reason your book does not see light of the day, it is demotivating even if you were paid well for the job. Dan Ariely's team conducts experiments where they pay people to create Lego blocks. For the people, who saw their 'creation' being demolished right in front of them, they found it difficult to go on with work even though they were being paid. So, we all like to find meaning in our work.
3. IKEA furniture works because we overvalue what we ourselves make. We kind of take pride in our creations even if it be a simple origami. IKEA works - it’s not too complicated and yet it gives you bask in that pride that comes when you create your own thing.
4. How sometimes we pass up great ideas because they weren't ours. We didn't think them. So many times, wise aegis is that make your bosses feel that the idea came from them.
5. Why revenge gives us pleasure? Why we punish when we feel things have been unjust. Creative ways customer seek revenge, for example, a viral video about a hotel's bad service. How sometimes apologies can be powerful.

Part 2 - Home-related Irrationalities

1. Human power of adaptation. Adaptation of pain. Or, adaption when your prized possessions no longer bring you happiness. How adaption can work for you.
2. On Dating. Hot or Not site, interesting dating patterns. Perception of beauty. More on online dating sites. How market fails.
3. Empathy and emotion - strange phenomenon where we all set out in hordes to help pay for a single person but when it is a genocide or a tragedy involving hundreds and thousands, our capacity to charity sort of diminishes. The 'Drop-in-the-bucket-effect'.
4. Long-term effect of short-term emotions such as anger, jealousy etc. - how our decisions are impacted.
5. Lessons from irrationalities - how we should test everything. In short, everything we do is not as logical as it may seem to us.

I really enjoyed the book quite a bit (lesser than its predecessor, of-course). My favorite part was the section on the "IKEA effect"--the fact that we value something more when we put it together, even if putting it together doesn't require much effort on our part (e.g. by adding the eggs and oil to a cake mix, we like the cake more than if we didn't have to add them). At the end, I like the thought "rather than strive for perfect rationality, we need to appreciate those imperfections that benefit us, recognize the ones we would like to overcome, and design the world around us in a way that takes advantage of our incredible abilities while overcoming some of our limitations.

Overall, a solid book if you like this kind of thing. There are many examples in which human can be a cuckoo or headless chicken at times. I wholeheartedly recommend this book along with his other book "Predictably Irrational”

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Shi"tare" 📚 

#thekataregirl