Photo credit: Matt Rubens
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is a collection of phenomena in the field of behavioral economics, which is a high-brow way of saying it’s about how people make their choices.
The findings in this book matter to anyone who needs to communicate, interact and persuade people, which includes non-profits who are trying to get funding, recruit personnel and generally get stuff done.
The main theme of the book is that we all believe we’re in control of our own choices, whereas in reality we’re motivated by “Animal Spirits”, vague and irrational motives we can’t usually fathom. And it’s not the same as saying we’re all dumb. Even the smartest folks are sometimes blind to their own motives (most of Ariely’s test subjects are Ivy League students, a convenient audience for a professor at MIT).
There are quite a few practical implications to this idea, which are easy to deduce from the book’s ample anecdotes and Ariely’s personal interpretation of experiment results and current studies. For example, when you want a website visitor to donate money, you’d be surprised how much of their decision depends on seemingly irrelevant things like the look-and-feel of the site they’re visiting. Making the donation button big and red may not help you get there, but making the site look great might.
One particular experiment, for example, demonstrated this exact point. People were given free coffee samples with an array of stuff they could add to it (sugar, cream etc). They were then asked whether they liked the coffee and, more importantly, how much they were willing to pay for it, should it be sold in the cafeteria. All else being equal, when the additives were served in Styrofoam cups with ragged, hand torn edged and hand-written post-it labels, the coffee was not as well liked, and the price people were willing to pay was lower than when the additives were presented in a nice set of metal trays and spoons. The lesson is clear: brand and user experience have a marked influence on choices, even if when we’re not aware of it.
Some of the cases in the book were familiar. Some were mentioned in similar books, such as Blink, Freakonomics, Why We Buy etc. Most are too anecdotal for my taste (I like my samples wider than a handful of neighborhood trick-or-treating kids). In some cases Ariely tells the stories in a way that almost feels like he’s just trying to stretch the text for no reason. While it’s probably more engaging to read about an experiment in the placebo effect in this style rather than glancing over some tables, charts and a heap of scientific terms, I’m not sure why the greco-roman columns on the way to the lab are described in such detail either.
Although I’ve read some better written texts on this subject, most of them on how behavioral economics applies to the recent economic meltdown (like this great article in Scientific American), this book is still a useful survey of applicable scientific findings for nonprofits and designers, and almost everyone else who’s selling or buying something.