Dan Ariely Quotes

What people do is they pay the small loans first. Why? Because they enjoy making the number of loans smaller. But of course it is a very ineffective way to pay debt down.

In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.

Money is a great way to get happiness. Right? Lots of wonderful things you can do with money. The question is, are we really optimizing on that? So, if you think about getting lattes and getting cable. Which one of those is actually giving you a greater happiness, and if you have to cut on one of those, which one would you cut? So, I think thinking in terms of concrete terms would help us a great deal.

A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.

Interesting thing that is happening in American society is that people are starting to talk about money. I don't know how you feel about this, but for a long time, nobody was talking about money. It was a secret. And it's kind of very interesting because we do lots of stuff to portray to people about how much money we have, the clothes we wear and the cars we have and the house - they all kind of depict to other people, signal how much money we make, but we don't talk about it specifically.

The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.

When you get a checking account, you should have a savings account, and the number for the savings account should be one off of your checking account.

We need to believe that we're good people, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that perception.

Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be really terrible.

If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools, and methods to help us make better decisions and improve our overall well-being? That's exactly the meaning of free lunches- the idea that there are tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire-pg. 241

Once we start thinking of ourselves as polluted, there is not much incentive to behave well, and the trip down the slippery slope is likely.

What you should do is wait until the end of each month, and then say, "OK, how much money do I have? How much do I need? Let me send the rest to retirement."

If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.

Imagine you owe on five credit cards, you owe five debts. So which debt should you pay first? And the answer is very simple: You should pay the one with the highest interest rate first. But that's not what people do.

People are irrational - and predictably so.

Linking financial element to energy consumption I think has a huge role if you think about a display instrument that could teach us about what we are using, how much it costs us, how much it is saving, and therefore change our decisions.

In terms of the actual curriculum for management education, my own view is very simple-minded: The world is incredibly complex, it changes all the time, and we should not even hope that we could create a general model that accurately describes the world in all its possible states.

When parents have college savings accounts for their kids, their kids show higher social and cognitive performance.

What kind of people would be able to rationalize better than other people? Better storytellers, right? Creative people, right? Because if you're creative, you find more ways to cheat and still yourself a story about why this is okay.

We can think about how we reduce the pain in paying. So, for example, credit cards are wonderful mechanisms to reduce the pain of paying. If you go to a restaurant and you are paying cash, you would feel much worse than if you were paying with credit card. Why? You know the price, there's no surprise, but if you're paying cash, you feel a bit more guilt.

Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.

But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .

I don't know what exactly the translation is but when we do consume something now, something else has to give at some point.

Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.

One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.

While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.

Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.

Kids don't care what party they have, right? They want cake and they want to run around. Nothing else matters. But in this escalation, all the kids want parties like their friends. So, if all the friends have an amazing, expensive party, they all want the same thing. If we all got to scale down as a coordinated effort, all the kids would have been just as happy.

I don't think we should go around life and being miserable all the time and feel the pain of paying. It's a question of what categories we want to spend more on and what categories we want feel that we are spending too much on and we want to cut down.

Money is very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota? Now, you would expect people to have an answer. But people were kind of shocked by the question. They never thought about it before. So, the most we got was people said, "Well, if I can't buy this Toyota, if I buy this Toyota, I can't buy a Honda." What is this thing? What is this value of price? Very hard to think about it.

We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.

It is very difficult to make really big, important, life-changing decisions because we are all susceptible to a formidable array of decision biases. There are more of them than we realize, and they come to visit us more often than we like to admit.

Marketing is all about providing information that will heighten someone's anticipated and real pleasure.

When you're in pain, tomorrow doesn't exist - just the pain - and the only thing that you want in the world is for it to go away.

Imagine 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.

I don't want to say that the poor are inherently cognitively diminished, but at the end of the day of making difficult, tough decisions, it's very hard to have the energy to think about things with the right mindset.

Money are very difficult to think about. So, we think about money as the opportunity cost of money. So, we at some point went to a Toyota dealership and we asked people, what will you not be able to do in the future if you bought this Toyota?

The major thing that holds you back when you're trying to change a bad habit like eating, smoking, or drinking too much is your belief you are out of control.

None of us always make the best financial decisions.

The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.

If you have loans, the first thing you want to do is say, "Okay, look I have a credit card, if I really need to borrow, I have this emergency money that I can get, but for now there is no reason for me to keep cash at zero percent interest rate and at the same time, pay all of this money out. So, I think people need to figure out quickly how to pay loans and how much cash they should really keep.

Motivation, basically getting people to be happy at work, everybody - everybody benefits.

When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.

The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations.

With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.

Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.