Making a living, no matter how you do it, provides countless opportunities to stop and say to yourself, “Everyone I work with is nuts!” And you might be right. In a new book, Predictably Irrational, author and economist Dan Ariely studies and comments on the bizarre decisions made by people at work, and in life. And in the entertaining process, we discover some surprising truths about the way people think. In fact, the author has a fascinating website, www.predictablyirrational.com, that showcases his unique views on the decisions people make and how we all behave. Here is an excerpt from his website that explains the background of the book: Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by? Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need? Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?
Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace? By the end of this book, you’ll know the answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world. As a bonus you will also learn how much fun social science can be, and how to see more clearly the causes for our everyday behaviors, including the many cases in which we are predictably irrational.
Ariely goes on to say that this book is his attempt “to take research findings in behavioral economics and describe them in non academic terms so that more people will learn about this type of research, discover the excitement of this field, and possibly use some of the insights to enrich their own lives.” Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and at the Media Laboratory, a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and a visiting professor at Duke University. So the guy seems to be extremely qualified, to say the least. This book serves as amusing, highly entertaining and provocative with content that can help any professional, entrepreneur or business owner see the world (and the people we work with) a little more clearly. | 
