Dan Ariely and Irrational Comparison | Hacker News Reader

Dan Ariely and Irrational Comparison

brendancahill.io

93 pointsbrendancahill40 comments

I think it is worth noting that some of the more surprising results in the behavioural economics literature have failed to replicate. A quick search will find many articles discussing this. I believe there is definitely a strong core in behavioural economics, but the especially "pop science" experiments (e.g. people walk more slowly when primed to think about old age, which IIRC is in "Thinking Fast and Slow") should be taken with a grain of salt.

This is fair criticism from what I've seen too, though for passers by I'd just say that it shouldn't necessarily entirely discredit the field. What particularly interests me, is the "nudge" applications which have been adopted by govts. over the past number of years. Whilst most of their plans miss, the ones that stick are incredible, such as the setting of defaults to drastically increase organ donors and improve pensions and investments.

Was about to make similar comment about connection with behavioral economics and how we should be wary of certain claims. Also there is some strong criticism of applying nudge theories on complex systems. That being said, as you point out as well, some nudge techniques do lead to beneficial results (for all) and I think it's important to recognize (and econs. point out) that if you design a UX, process, building, gadget ect. you are by definition what they call a choice architect. Side note: I was fascinated how much design/choice/nudge thinking is considered here in Denmark. It's very noticeable in design of public buildings and govt. webservices

I’m not sure I want the government opting me in to programs any more than I want Google opting me in to things that may not be in my best interest.

If dark patterns start working their way into government, god help us all.

Just FYI, govt. dark patterns in the US have been around for a very long time. For example, you could read about the "literacy" tests for voting in Southern states. Robert Caro has a nice description in Master of the Senate, vol. 2 of his LBJ biography.

EDIT: (From Caro) Questions on these tests posed to Black people in Alabama have included: "Give the names of all sixty-seven county judges in the state", "State the date when Oklahoma was admitted to the Union", and "How many bubbles there are in a bar of soap".

There are positives to the default being opt in, e.g. organ donor.

There could be negatives of course, there is no substitute for an informed citizenry and indepedent media to challenge such instances.

In setting defaults, you’re always making a choice.

“By default, all drivers will not be marked as organ donors.” vs “By default, all drivers will be marked as organ donors.”

“By default, all employees at companies with 401(k)s will save X% of their eligible salary in 401(k)s.”

You’re making a choice for them in any event.

I agree with you but we also need to be careful given how powerful defaults are. Even Thaler has, I believe, argued against organ donation being opt out; rather I think he's argued for requiring a yes/no choice when driver's licenses are renewed. (The argument is opt out would lead to next of kin/families arguing that the deceased never made a choice to donate.)

Ad companies argued this when Microsoft updated IE (or was it Edge?) to set the DNT flag to “1” by default.

I think they were right to argue as such, and wonder if MS knew that defaulting DNT to on would poison the well like that.

It’s a good argument. When people argue over what a default should be, they often don’t realize that it’s possible to have no default at all, and force an explicit choice.

If you require customers to make dozens of choices because you’re not willing to make some sensible default choices, some of them will make the choice to use another browser.

I’m not a Microsoft cheerleader (nor detractor) in general, but in this case, I’m glad they took a position and chose a default on behalf of their customers.

Unfortunately (and predictably) it backfired though. If it no longer represents a conscious user choice, DNT can be pretty safely ignored by Google and the likes.

Yes, but more specifically on Thinking, Fast and Slow, as noted elsewhere[1][2]:

It is only the priming-related chapter (called 'The Associative Machine' in the book) that put "too much faith in under-powered studies", as Kahneman put it[3]. Not the entire book!

The book is a synthesis of forty years of Kahneman's research and his collaboration with his late colleague, Tversky. A wide range of topics are covered; and it still absolutely merits reading. Patiently dive into the book and make up your mind.

(But yes, a v2 of this book definitely is worth it, given the "authority" of the Nobel Memorial Prize.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22054603

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21757524

[3] https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...

This always gets mentioned and upvoted to the top but there has really only been one priming experiment that has been discredited.

I read Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" years and years ago, and was fascinated by it. I'd been an economics graduate, and was surprised that we were only introduced to "Behavioural Economics" as a field in the final semester of the course.

To be sure, if you want to read far more academic material, you should look at Kahneman, Sunstein or Thaler's books - but Ariely's writing style is in my opinion more fun and approachable to the lay person. It was definitely my gateway drug into the subject matter.

Charlie Munger said "if economics isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?"

A weird bastard child of ideology and mathematics.

note that an ideology on its own is not bad (or necessarily good). it's being ideological--adhering to an ideology against any and all evidence--that's bad. humanity, including science, economics, the arts, etc., is driven by ideology, ideas that take hold because of a tantalizing kernel of truth in them. progress (and regress) happens on the back of ideology.

the rational actor at the center of economics is an ideological construct that we act to always maximize our economic return. how we adhere, and the system adheres, to that ideal has been the focus of a significant strain of economic thought. behavioral economics is another ideological strain that focuses primarily on those deviations (perhaps as a dominant mode) rather than the adherences of the progenitor ideology.

About 10 years ago, I too, as a newbie-layman, started with "Predictably Irrational". I recall being similarly fascinated, and recommending it to anyone who'd listen to me. It's surely a gentler start to the field; and I concur with you on suggestions for deeper material.

Nudge is pretty easy reading from Thaler and Sunstein. Personally tough, I preferred his Misbehaving which goes into his history with the field. Way back when, I had a couple courses with Thaler when he was calling the field Behavioural Decision Theory.

Agreed - Misbehaving is a really interesting history of the development of the field, and the characters introduced along the way. I was also doing Thaler a dis-service, I find his writing to be far more page-turny than Kahneman or Sunstein.

> Misbehaving is a really interesting history of the development of the field

A Thaler-centric history. There are others...

(I have a copy of Misbehaving.)

Thanks for the 'Misbehaving' recommendation.

I've been very interested in the behavioural economics field in general, but for some reason I always find that Ariely tends to jump too fast to conclusions.

Most of his experiments I read about have other explanations that fit the data just as well. For instance, the "The Economist" subscription has another explanation to simple comparison, choice deferral.

People don't really know if they'll want the online or print version, so are happy to pay extra for not having to make that choice now. If you only give them the two choices, you force them to choose. I'm not saying he is wrong, just that I miss him considering other alternatives (that to me sound way more plausible, but are less publication-sexy).

I don't get your argument. Those who are in "choice deferral" and chose online+print in the first experiment ought to have picked the same in the second experiment, but they didn't.

If you make me chose right now between online and print, I need to think which of those suits me better, will I read on my phone? Would I rather have the physical thing and have some rest time from the screens?

If there’s an easy to pick offer bundling the two, I’d rather pay the extra to keep the choice open, that is, to choose later.

But that's not what happened! When the print-only option was removed, people switched to the cheap online-only option. I recommend you re-read the description of the study.

Regarding choice deferral, perhaps you should take another closer look at that experiment. It seems to me that you may have missed the fact that the choice that was taken away is not "online + print", but rather "print only", which yielded 0 subscribers in the original batch.

I didn't, think of it this way:

In the first experiment I can choose if I'd rather have online (59$) or print version(125$). Either way I'm risking the disappointment of taking the wrong choice, or I can choose online for 59$ plus a 66$ hedge against choosing wrong.

In the second experiment you've eliminated the risk of choosing print and realizing later that I wanted online, so hedging makes less sense (i.e. I'm willing to pay less for hedging my choice).

This is a very good point that is often overlooked. Many “irrational” actions may actually be much more rational when interpreted a differently way. For example, loss aversion is totally rational since money has diminishing marginal utility. (And studies have mostly disproven loss aversion with small amounts)

Another issue with experiments is that they are not realistic scenarios. For example, in the Economist experiment no one actually paid any money. Which makes it basically worthless. We’ve often found in economics research that what people say they will do and what they actually do is very different. Moreover, studies only find that some % act irrationally but then it’s reported as if everyone did.

Now obviously humans are not totally rational, but it does us a disservice to act as if we are so terrible at decisions all of the time.

Tricking the mind though can lead to higher churn rates (poorer retention rates) later. Most people do realize what the true value of their purchase is sooner or later - it might take a few cycles, e.g. monthly subscription payments to make the right conclusions. You might have a spike in your revenue figures now but you might see deteriorating retention indicators a few cycles later. In other words some (many? all?) "tricks" work only in the short term. In fact some of your users will leave your platform with the negative aftertaste of having been tricked.

I was originally fascinated by this book and others like it. During the course of my reading, I stumbled upon Gerd Gigerenzer and I learnt a different interpretation. In short, most of these experiments assume full information is available to the testers and make an argument about rational process. As such, their applicability in real life is small, in specific edge cases. The question we should ask and answer is that, in a world of partial, incorrect and misleading information, what is the most rational judgement to make? And that mostly matches with how we behave.

If you're a fan of Dan's, I just realized recently he has a board game out! https://irrationalgame.com

Isn't this known as the Decoy effect? Having a middle tier makes the pricing more palatable.

His follow-on book: "The Upside of Irrationality" is also a great read.

It's almost the exact same book. I felt ripped off having bought both.

You sound like an ideal customer for his next book: The Downside of Rationality./s

He should release a mini ebook for free. To capture the irrational value we place on free stuff, of course.

There is nothing irrational in seeing the right hand orange circle as bigger. It even says so in the text: "depends on context". The word irrational in the tile is just clickbait.

The concept of anchoring is pretty ancient, no?

And Joel Spolsky, in 2004, summarizing thoughts on pricing and segmentation: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

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