You can think about life as a battle between you and a doughnut shop. The doughnut shop wants you to eat another doughnut and pay the money, and you want to do it in the short term, but in the long term it's not good for you either financially or from a health perspective.
Dan ArielyOwnership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea - whether itโs about politics or sports - what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we canโt stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology - rigid and unyielding.
Dan ArielyImagine you have six loans, small to huge. People want to close loans and because of that, they try to pay off the small loans, but that's not the right strategy. The right strategy, of course, is to pay the loan with the highest interest rate. People make this mistake and it costs them lots and lots of money, it's a very expensive mistake because interest rates accumulate and become very, very expensive very quickly.
Dan ArielyThe most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we donโt see how our conflicts of interest work on us.
Dan ArielyIn the U.S., I think there is an ideology of not telling kids what to do. Nobody to tell you who to marry, not tell you what job to pick. You're your own person. You have the freedom to choose, including the freedom to fail in magnificent ways. And I think that's the big difference. In other countries there is basically a social norm about saving that is passed from generation to generation. In the U.S. there isn't.
Dan Ariely