Mike's Reviews > Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Oh God, what shit. Where to begin?

The simplest start is to take issue with the premise, which is simply that the model of a 'rational actor' as defined in classical economics is ridiculous for two reasons: one because of how irrational we are naturally, but also that the degree of our irrationality is so pervasive as to be testable and demonstrable in a way that studies that prove it are easily replicated. This is good. Data replication is crucial. It's a shame that this stubborn notion of a 'rational actor' hasn't been obliterated in even current debate among economics experts, NYT op/ed hacks, and sweat-smeared pundits, but it still doesn't help Dan Ariely's trainwreck from being an overblown straw-man argument against an obvious case. Of course a rudimentary concept such as the rational actor being found along two hypothetical straight lines doesn't encompass human experience. If you're going to make this obvious point, do it in a way that's convincing with data from which it is safe to extrapolate. Dan Ariely fails on these accounts and more.

Oddly, let's start with the more: his total ineptitude for obvious answers that lie within the sociological disciplines. He seems baffled by how white-collar crime is seen as sterile and ineffectual, though more catastrophic, than violent, petty robbery or vandalism against property. Why is this, he says? He talks about how the process of mediation - how having proxies around money stand in for money - changes how we perceive cheating or theft. This misses the point. People still see vandalism and petty theft - of property, not money itself, mind you - as more dreadful or lowly, and worthy of incarceration, than the greed that devastated a global economy. In his discussion he omits any mention of racism and classism: could it be that we condemn petty theft because it's the symptom of a subordinate class being oppressed to the point of desperation? Could it be that it's because the "war on crime" was so racially coded and abetted thanks to COPS (the show and the over-militarized killers) and distorting media imagery that the mental image of a burglar that is conjured in the public imagination is that of a young Black male? Not to mention our contempt for what we are as poor as opposed to the kind of unfettered prosperity we desire as rich. These are low-hanging fruit answers Ariely missed the boat on completely, and it's downright stupid that he missed them.

Now a brief word about his sexist bullshit. Take page 77, wherein he takes the case of a man being frustrated that he's taken a woman out to dinner with no sex in exchange. He casually mentions that after four dinners he ought to get something out of it, right? "He should have known that one can't mix social and market norms - especially in this case - without implying that the lady is a tramp. He should also have remembered the immortal words of Woody Allen: 'The most expensive sex is free sex.'" Not only is he quoting the most inappropriate mentor for sexual counsel imaginable, but look at how he misses the point of pervasive sexism here. What are the forces at play that make dinner with another woman not its own reward? Why with such flippance is it okay to make the man the one with agency here and blame his mistake on the blending of norms? Isn't it also about seeing women as more than sexual property, as perhaps a human being? For anyone remotely awake to how the patriarchy functions, it's a miserable omission and an astoundingly tone-deaf example in a book rife with them.

His example for fixing employment disillusionment on page 90 is about incorporating more social norms into workplace environments: and while I agree that health insurance coverage should be a part of the mix, he's amazed at how start-up companies are getting so much productivity out of employees (91). Yet the tide is turning: start-ups are garnering bad reputations for the burnout its staff experience, and are ridiculed for the absurd perks and ping-pong tables that they put into their offices in its wake. Nowhere in this discussion of enhancing quality of life is the mere mention of work-life balance, collective bargaining, fair and equitable pay, &c. It's about how manipulating social norms can entrap labor in a contract they may be too scared to leave. Except they're not really: it's no wonder start-ups have such high turnover.

There are glaring issues with his extrapolations from his cutesy studies, though. So many that I can't possibly list them all here. For example, Ariely concludes that students become more conscious of not being selfish maximizers when chocolates are free to take as opposed to one or two pennies to take. When they are cheap, people don't consider the supply for someone else. Yet this conclusion is then meant to show why carbon cap-and-trade policies are a bad idea. In what world can chocolate - a mostly unnecessary, inexpensive, and far-from-scarce good - as consumed by privileged college students become an indicator of international macroeconomic policy meant on saving life as we know it? Why not look at oil instead? His case is weak especially since he relies on rational economic models that he wishes to debunk in order to support his claim here: a company "might well decide, after a cost-benefit analysis, that it can go ahead and pollute a lot more" (115). It's weird for Ariely to reincorporate cost-benefit analyses as tried-and-true metrics considering how irrational those analyses might be according to his own findings, but no matter: his "better" solution is to "make pollution into an easily measurable and observable quantity and get people to pay attention to it and understand its importance" by "publically posting the pollutant amounts of different countries, states, and companies together" (116). This is demonstrably failing. The United States has "elected" a leader who believes climate change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese. The United States feels so little of the shame Ariely expects it to feel for being so obstinately non-committal to climate change resolution after climate change resolution that to imbue any sense of optimism into it feels naive beyond belief. The gargantuan body of literature confirming climate change as a phenomenon, and the cornucopia of reports verifying it, not to mention the increase of natural disasters occurring before our very eyes, has done little to get people to pay attention to it and understand its importance. This is in part because of the irrational parts of human nature that Ariely should understand well enough to know his proposal is stupid. Another part is his models are not comprehensive enough to capture the entirety of backfire effects, political dealings, propaganda manufacturing, and political tweaking. Nor does he account for the fact that his discussion of market failures - in this case, "externalities" - is a classical doctrine that better accounts for the phenomenon he's describing as a behavioral economist.

The list of disasters goes on and on: he studies only men to make a judgment about all people in the chapter "The Influence on Arousal." There's a huge fallacy in his methodology in this chapter: he asks people when not sexually aroused what they would do if aroused. Then he arouses them and asks them what they would do when sexually aroused. His conclusion? That people who are sexually aroused would be more likely to cheat, sexually assault, have sex with older women and even an animal, and therefore we are bad indicators of gauging how we'll act when we're aroused. But wait a second. In order for this to be true, Ariely would have to prove that when people are sexually aroused, they are good gauges for what they will do when they are sexually aroused. The only evidence he has presented is that these people self-reported while they were aroused that they would be more willing to perform these things. But what if people are bad at judging what they'd do when they're aroused...both while they're aroused and when not? If we're interested in measuring actual behavior when aroused, perhaps it's best to measure actual behavior when aroused, not responses to hypothetical questions while aroused. I don't understand why he would say our judgment gets more cloudy and impulsive while we are aroused, but doesn't extend that principle to say our judgment gets more cloudy and impulsive while answering surveys or doing experiments while aroused. At best he can say that people are bad judges - when not aroused - of how they'll self-report their hypothetical behavior when aroused, but that's all he's proven. He has not proven with his evidence any change in actual conduct. He makes the embarrassing example of how it's because of "the heat of passion" and its interplay with our irrational psyche that "a priest rapes a boy" (128). So much for the long-established notion that rape is about power, power, power. He would rather teach adolescents to say no before any arousal or temptation takes hold than challenge the assumption that teenagers should avoid sex, which is hypocritical of him since later in the book he asks us why we don't model our policies after how people actually behave rather than how they should (317). If we modeled our policies after how teenagers actually behaved when dealt abstinence-only or anti-coveting education, well, we'd end up in the disaster we're in. Good thing we're not following Dan Ariely's advice on one instance, and following his advice about how to model policies based on actual behavior in another. Which Dan Ariely do I like or dislike?

Also how did he get a study where he painfully shocks people past an institutional review board? The answer is he probably didn't, and he's fabricating a study. I hope this does not bear repeating.

It doesn't help that he's a creep that lets a student confide in him to somewhat revolting effect (186) or that his protocols for better behavior address only those with comfortable incomes at prestigious universities (no way to split those bills the way you want, Dan, if you're broke and don't go out with the same people to the same fancy restaurant every week). He quotes Skinner and Freud, both of whom have been widely debunked. His "vanishing doors" example (194-195) eludes the more viable concept of choice paralysis, as well as totally misses the point that the situation presented is no surrogate for real life. Any vanishing door will have variable benefits to it in real life, therefore the study is a chronicle of perfectly rational risk aversion, not irrationality. Every study in here is a failure in what happens when we try to assess human behavior with a limited demographic in a limited space without any of the appropriate context that human life functions within.

But wait, there's more! Ariely somehow believes that patients' self-assessments of their own pain should be taken at face value (227) even though pain is notoriously difficult to capture, empathize with, and measure across people. Nor is there any mention of how human beings might not be fully honest about telling medical professionals how successful treatment was, in part because they may be shy about telling the professional the treatment failed, they may want to believe so much that they feel better that they say so in a survey to try to convince themselves, that they say they're fine out of sheer denial, or any other innumerable complexities that go into why a person might not be fully honest when they disclose they feel better to a professional (oh, let's not forget the power dynamic often enshrined within that exchange) that should be controlled for or accounted for beyond being swept into a "placebo effect" umbrella. The book is so reductive it's nauseating. And when it's not making outlandish and uninformed claims like "Before recent times, almost all medicines were placebos" (229) it's just repetitive dreck. I guess he didn't know that some "non-recent times" medicines worked because, oh let's see, willow bark actually has aspirin in it, for fucking example.

I'm not even close to done with how much garbage there is in this book. Just ugh. Fucking ugh.