interesting stuff: Dan Ariely from Duke University

Tendencies of Irrational Behavior, Presented on December 13th, 2008

You can examine Dan Ariely's website for further discourse on Irrational Behavior and also follow an interesting paper he authored on "Zero as a special price: The true value of free products".

I very much like his point that the person designing the forms greatly influence our decision-making process. This is true in more than just the DMV example he gives at the beginning of the video. If, for example, you eat food during your childhood based on what is in your fridge... the degree to which you are healthy and consuming food that is good for you completely depends on the person stocking the fridge. In this way, you may unconsciously gain the habit of eating well simply because your parents have dictated in some way what your pattern of food consumption would be. This has nothing to do with our desire to eat well, as we don't even consider our diet when deciding what to eat. All in all, this was a very interesting video and I appreciated Dan Ariely's discourse on Irrational Behavior simply because of his ability to make his research enjoyable to receive.