Upside of Irrationality Review - the Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

The Upside of Irrationality:

The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

By Dan Ariely

Published in 2010

Summary:

The author, Dan Ariely, draws on his background in behavioral economics along with his own personal experiences to explore irrational human behaviors and how they can affect decision making the workplace and in interpersonal relationships. He describes experiments to help the reader understand the several idiosyncrasies in human thought and behavior such as over-motivation wherein providing too much incentive can actually lead to poorer performance; and the IKEA effect where pride and sentiments can lead us to overvalue an object. The goals of the book is to help readers understand that there can often be beneficial outcomes resulting from irrational behaviors and make sense of how humans operate in order to make in effort for real personal and external changes.

Strengths:

The Upside of Irrationality is meant to offer the reader insights on how human actually behave in certain situations. Traditional economics will tell you that eventually all markets will behave rationally and thus the individual persons in those markets will act rationally. The author goes through a series of experiments he conducted to explore behaviors that most of us often engage without any conscious thought. Also, the author makes excellence use of anecdotal evidence to further engage the reader's attention and creates an almost preternatural sense of familiarity with the cases and subjects. The conversational style of the book allows the complex subject of human behavior to be presented in easy to understand concepts.

Weaknesses:

Though the author does utilize experiments to provide a basis for his claims, some of the experiments in his book are questionable at best. For example, Ariely generalizes an experiment correlating bonuses to performance on simple tasks performed by villagers of an Indian village to Wall Street bankers. The environment in which the two groups are in preclude any sense in generalization the results from one group to another. Furthermore, the book seems to deviate from the use of any evidence and, rather, makes use of his own subjective experiences.

Organizational Behavior Insights:

1. Perception allows us to recognize objects, people, and written words. This concept is of particular importance in this book as perception is a central theme in all the "irrationalities" described in the book. The way a person perceives an action or event will subsequently determine how he or she will act or react. Understanding our perception of things will allow us to manage our emotions