The Science of Irrational Decisions 244
The Rat Race Trap blog has a look at one aspect of the irrational decision-making process humans employ, based on the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. "Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls 'arbitrary coherence.' Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions. That's the coherence part. Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made. I've read about that many times before, but what was surprising in this book was the the 'arbitrary' part. ... [In an experiment] the fact that the students contemplated a decision at a completely arbitrary price, the last two digits of their social security number, very heavily influenced what they were willing to pay for the product. The students denied that the anchor influenced them, but the data shows something totally different. Correlations ranged from 0.33 to 0.52. Those are extremely significant."
Not sure (Score:2, Funny)
I think Im 50 / 50 on this one
So (Score:5, Funny)
Will it help me to understand why I read Slashdot instead of doing something productive with my time?
Re:Yeehaw (Score:4, Funny)
define "big words". do you mean closer to "potato" or closer to "superstructure"
Re:So (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. You arbitrarily decided to read Slashdot one day. In order to maintain internal consistency, your brain had to make it seem like this is a good idea, and continually offers up excuses for reading Slashdot.
Re:TFA (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe they were flying a plane.
Re:So (Score:5, Funny)
You probably do it too much, though, as you obviously have never spent any time with a dictionary. If you did, you would realize that you just stated that certain shows show intent to physically harm your brain.
Please use the word "literally" literally in the future.
Windows (Score:2, Funny)
In other words, a company that installs Windows on its first PC will probably install it on thousands of additions, instead of installing Linux on hundreds.
The wife's ends in 99 (Score:4, Funny)
The wife's number ends in 99, which explains everything.
Re:So (Score:5, Funny)
In order to maintain internal consistency, your brain had to make it seem like this is a good idea, and continually offers up excuses for reading Slashdot.
Pfft, I don't need excuses. I can stop reading Slashdot any time I want!
Re:Yard Sales (Score:3, Funny)
I do. And when they start to explain why it costs $30,000 more then my offer I go "Well why didn't you say it costs $30,001 in the first place?"
Re:So (Score:1, Funny)
Teee hee hee.
My mother in-law just brought her "modem" over to my house because someone at tech support told her that her processor's memory died and needs a new motherboard.
Re:Not sure (Score:3, Funny)
Aha! We now have the last two digits of your social security number...
Question. If you were to represent your odds of agreeing with this study as a *nine* digit number, what would it be?
Re:So (Score:0, Funny)