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Are we in control of our decisions? | Dan Ariely

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For anyone, no background needed. Education, not medical advice.

2.2M views17 years ago2 recommendations

Brain and nervesNeuroscience

Dan Ariely uses visual and cognitive illusions to demonstrate how human decision-making is predictably irrational and influenced by defaults.

ted.com Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at ted.com/index.php/talks/top10 Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/tednews Checkout our Facebook page for TED exclusives facebook.com/TED

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its insightful explanation of how default choices and cognitive biases shape human decisions, particularly in organ donation.

dhruvalin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Proposed Law Would Require Social Networks to be Private by Default”

I wouldn't label it stupidity or ignorance, but it is a weel documented quirk of human behavior the default state of opt in / opt out systems makes a huge difference. This ted talk is an excellent and talks about the very significant differences in organ donation rates between countries that use an opt out system vs. those that use an opt in. link to this video
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jason_pomerleauin Hacker News • Recommends

On “Teller Reveals His Secrets (2012)”

> 7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. Dan Ariely has a great talk on "decision illusions"(1) that goes into more depth on this topic. He starts off with visual illusion as a metaphor for rationality: "So if we have these repeatable and predictable mistakes with vision, which we are so good at, what's the chance we don't make even more mistakes with something we're not as good at?" (1) link to this video
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politicianin Hacker News • Mentions

On “A Common Pricing Mistake”

About 3 years ago, Dan Ariely presented "Are we in control of our actions" 1 which demonstrated, among other things, that when offering 3 graduated choices the middle choice has a strong orienting effect on the decider. That is, the middle choice points the way towards which pair should be considered - the bottom two or the top two. The prices of the author's packages are $39, $79, and $169. The differences are $40 and $90, respectively. According to Ariely, in this situation more people will consider the $39/$79 pair (because they are more similar, in this case based on price) rather than the $79/$169 pair, and, in fact, this is what the author reports. 1 link to this video
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molochin Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Cost Of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years Of Regret”

This touches on an interesting human behavior; the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is huge, much larger than $0.01 to $0.02, or even $0.01 to $0.99 - this is talked about (among other interesting topics) in the book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely. link link to this video
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fizixerin Hacker News • Mentions

On “How convolutional neural networks see the world”

…al illusion'. It's just that the machine has illusions about something completely different. I believe exploring the space of architectures/weights/what-not might lead towards making a machine get into the same kind of optical illusions as the human visual system gets into. At the least, it looks like a very promising research direction to me. 1 link to this video…
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