April 24, 2012

The Upside of
Irrationality
The Unexpected Benefits of Defying
Logic at Work and at Home
Dan Ariely

©2010 by Dan Ariely

Adapted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 978-0-06-199503-3

Introduction
In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely draws on
his background in behavioral economics to exam-
ine irrational human behavior and how it affects
decision making in the workplace and in human rela-
tionships. The goal of behavioral economics is to make
sense of the way humans operate, so that people
can observe their biases, be more in tune with what
influences them, and make better decisions. Behav-
ioral economists study human frailty in order to find
more compassionate, realistic, and effective ways for
people to avoid temptation, exert more self-control,
and ultimately reach their long-term goals. They do
not assume humans are perfectly sensible, calculat-
ing machines—often their observations reveal that
human beings are irrational. Over the centuries,
humans developed behaviors that at one time made
perfect sense for their survival. However, with the
mismatch between the speed of technological devel-
opment and human evolution, those same behaviors,
instincts, and abilities that were helpful in the past
now often hinder people. Behavioral economists
also hope to influence the way inventors, companies,
and policy makers design and regulate working and
living environments in ways that are naturally more
compatible with the way humans act and with what
they can and cannot do. Understanding what drives
human behavior and how people can be led astray
helps individuals gain control over their money, rela-
tionships, resources, safety, and health.
Part I. The Unexpected Ways We Defy
Logic at Work
Paying More for Less
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many people
expressed outrage that banking CEOs and investment
executives continued to receive very large perfor-

Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely
mance-based bonuses. Boards of directors generally
assume that these super-sized bonuses motivate high-
level executives to increase their efforts and produce
higher quality results. Ariely and his colleagues con-
ducted several experiments and discovered some
interesting results about the motivational effects of
very high incentives. They found that people who
stood to earn a low-level or medium-level bonus for
performing well on cognitive tasks outperformed
those who were given the opportunity to earn much
higher rewards for performing well on the same tasks.
The effort was so stressful for those who could earn
very large bonuses that they choked under the pres-
sure to perform. Their experiments, however, showed
that paying high bonuses for simple mechanical tasks
does result in higher performance. It was only when
the test subjects had to perform tasks requiring mental
activity that the offer of high bonuses caused a nega-
tive effect on performance.
The negative effect of offering high incentives is not
a phenomenon that many people naturally intuit, yet
when Ariely and his fellow researchers offer their find-
ings to high-ranking executives, they discover how
little these business people know about the efficacy of
their compensation plans and how little concern there
is among the executives to improve these plans. The
executives argue that those people being offered very
high levels of incentives are the kind of workers who
perform best under stressful conditions and, there-
fore, the results of the research do not apply to them.
A person’s performance can be affected by various
types of stress, such as being fearful of speaking in
public or being worried about how others perceive
one’s abilities in a social or work situation. As they
try harder to overcome fear or receive peer recogni-
tion, people might actually behave less rationally and
be less productive. If this is the case, human resources
departments might need to reconsider how to pay
employees, finding ways to include the motivating
element of performance-based incentive pay while
eliminating the non-productive consequences of the
stress caused by over-motivation due to very high
incentive offerings.
The Meaning of Labor
The desire to accomplish meaningful goals is a
deep-seated need in humans. Workers can become
Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved
Key Concepts
• Understanding what drives human behav-
ior and how people can be led astray helps
individuals gain control over their money,
relationships, resources, safety, and health.
• People overvalue their own ideas and things
that they have invested effort in creating,
and they place less value on the output and
ideas of others.
• Most people miscalculate the extent or the
speed with which they will adapt to situa-
tions.
• By their nature, huge problems do not evoke
the emotions that will motive people to act
to solve them.
• Decisions humans make in the heat of
an emotional moment can also influence
related choices and decisions in other areas
of their lives long after the original decisions
were made.
• People are influenced by their irrational
tendencies more than they realize, not fully
understanding what drives their behaviors.
• By examining and testing assumptions,
people can discover when and how they
are wrong and improve the ways they love,
live, work, innovate, manage, and govern.
g g g g
Information about the author and subject:
http://danariely.com/
Information about this book and other business titles:
http://www.harpercollins.com/
Related summaries in the BBS Library:
How We Decide
By Jonah Lehrer
Buyology
Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
By Martin Lindstrom
Page 2
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely

de-motivated if they do not perceive the meaning and appreciative feedback, employees lose motivation to
accomplishment in their daily work efforts. Economic complete their work.
theorists believe that people will
always apply as minimal an effort [U]sing money to motivate people can be a double-edged
as possible to maximize their
sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate
reward. However, behavioral
economists seek the connections performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive
among motivation, personal is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby
meaning, and productivity. They distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward.
have conducted experiments that
show people are motivated more when they see their
When it comes to labor, human motivation is complex
labors resulting in meaningful accomplishments.
and cannot be reduced to a simplistic “work-for-
People will expend additional energy to complete
money” trade-off. Even before the innovations in
tasks when they know the outcome provides a satis-
Henry Ford’s factories, managers had been dividing
factory meaning of accomplishment.
tasks down into very small, discrete parts to build
It is easy to suck the meaning out of someone’s work. more efficiency into manufacturing processes. How-
A person could work diligently to produce a deliv- ever, that division of labor can exact a human cost if
erable for a project, only to discover that the project the worker cannot relate his task to the big picture
was cancelled and his deliverable had been discarded. and overall goals of production. The alienated worker
Companies that do this frequently, showing that the does not get a sense of purpose or completion from
workers’ labors are essentially meaningless, will his efforts and cannot find identity or meaning in his
find their workers are no longer motivated to com- work. Experiments show that the effect of meaning
plete projects. People are also motivated if they know on labor and the effect of eliminating meaning from
others appreciate the efforts they have put into an end- labor are very powerful motivators—more powerful
product. Knowing that someone else will appreciate than usually expected. In the absence of meaning,
their work can give their efforts the level of mean- workers have little desire to put their heart and soul
ing necessary to motivate them to produce. Without into their labor.
The IKEA Effect

About the Author
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of
Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke
University, with appointments at the Fuqua
School of Business, the Center for Cognitive
Neuroscience, the Department of Econom-
ics, and the School of Medicine. Ariely earned
one Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and another
Ph.D. in business administration. His work has
been featured in the New York Times, the Wall
Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Boston
Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, and Sci-
ence. He has appeared on CNN and CNBC and
is a regular commentator on American Public
Media’s Marketplace.
Pride of creation and ownership runs deep in the
human psyche. People who would not look twice at a
cheaply constructed piece of furniture will be proud of
their efforts when purchasing and assembling a simi-
lar piece from IKEA on their own. When instant cake
mixes were first introduced in the late 1940s, house-
wives were not enthusiastic about them, despite the
fact that the mixes saved them time and effort. Cake
mixes simplified the process of making a cake to the
point that the women no longer felt ownership and
pride of creation. The producers of the mixes changed
their products, so the women had to add a fresh egg
and a few other ingredients. Sales took off. This com-
bination of providing a benefit while allowing the
user of the product to retain a sense of ownership and
pride of creation later became known as the egg theory.
The fact that people are attached to things they make

Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved Page 3
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely
is not a new concept. Often, people will place a higher
value on the outcome of their own creative efforts than
of the efforts of others. More and more companies are
letting customers customize their products. However,
there is a delicate trade-off between effortlessness and
investment. If the companies ask for too much effort
from their customers, then they drive them away.
On the other hand, offering too little opportunity for
customization and personalization does not let the
customer become attached to the end-result.
As companies start to understand the true benefits of custom-
ization, they might start generating products that allow cus-
tomers to express themselves and ultimately give them higher
value and enjoyment.
People become attached to things that they have
invested effort in creating and, consequently, they
overvalue these objects. Not only do people overvalue
their own creations, but they are largely unaware of
their tendency to do so and think that others value
their efforts as much as they do. The more effort that
people put into creating something, the greater they
value and appreciate the effort, but only if the effort
results in a completed task. Conversely, when people
work at a task but cannot complete it, they feel less
attached to the work and the product.
The Not-Invented-Here Bias
Not only do people highly value the output of their
own labor, but they place a high value on ideas that
they come up with on their own, placing less value
on ideas of others. When people feel that they have
created something, they feel an increased sense of
ownership and begin to overvalue the usefulness and
importance of their ideas. This tendency for people to
be biased against ideas or products that they them-
selves have not devised is called the not-invented-here
bias. This bias can have negative consequences for
individuals and companies if people value the cul-
tures they create around their own beliefs, language,
processes, or products.
These tendencies can lead to both useful and detri-
mental consequences. On the positive side, someone
that understands the sense of ownership and pride
that comes from generating ideas and creating prod-
Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved
ucts can inspire others to be more committed to and
interested in the tasks at hand. Allowing others to
believe they have come up with an idea can imbue
in them a stronger sense of ownership in the concept.
On the negative side, this knowledge can be used
to manipulate others into doing tasks they typically
would not attempt. Also, falling in love with one’s
own ideas can lead to a fixation and addiction to a
concept, making a person blind to the value in other
ideas that might be better.
The Case for Revenge
Trust and revenge are two sides of
the same coin. Revenge is a deep-
seated human instinct. Researchers
discovered that during trust-ori-
ented experiments, many of the
subjects who had the opportunity to exact revenge on
untrusting partners did so, and they punished them
severely. Experimenters observed that while test sub-
jects were making their decisions to seek revenge,
activity increased in areas of their brains that are usu-
ally associated with seeking rewards. This suggested
that punishing betrayal, even at a cost, has biologi-
cal underpinnings and that this behavior is similar to
pleasure.
Humans are designed to maintain a high level of trust
in human society. Because trust and revenge are so
related, people get very upset when a social contract,
founded on trust, is violated. Under these circum-
stances, they are willing to go to great lengths and
costs to punish the offenders. This tendency was well
demonstrated during the 2008 financial meltdown.
People had entrusted banks with their investments,
life savings, and mortgages and felt betrayed and
angry when the banks failed. Not surprisingly, these
people expressed a strong desire for revenge and
were outraged at bailout plans.
Even small transgressions can trigger the instinct for
revenge. Bad customer service or inadequate support
makes customers mad, and they often seek retalia-
tion on the agent serving them at the moment. Acts of
revenge are not easy to observe from the CEO’s office,
and many companies do not have a sense about the
cause-and-effect relationship between their offending
behavior and the retaliatory urges of their angry cus-
Page 4
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely

tomers. a person’s level of happiness, but this effect wears off

Because revenge is so tightly tied to a person’s nature
to trust others, it is a difficult instinct to overcome. Sur-
prisingly, a simple apology from the offender can go a
long way to ameliorate vengeful urges. Also, peoples’
urges for revenge often become muted as time passes.
Finding useful ways to vent revenge helps people
deal with their feelings. Some successful businesses
have been started specifically to seek revenge by com-
peting with offending companies. Others have turned
their vengeful urges into humorous videos that they
post on the Internet.
Part II: The Unexpected Ways We Defy
Logic at Home
Getting Used to Things
Humans are very adaptable. When people encoun-
ter a new smell, texture, temperature, or background
noise, they are very aware of these sensations, but over
time they become accustomed to these sensations and
no longer pay attention to them. This ability allows
people to focus their limited attention on those things
that matter, such as changes in
their surroundings that might be Adaptation is an incredibly general process that operates at
a threat, and ignore other unim- deep physiological, psychological, and environmental levels,
portant stimuli. and it affects us in many aspects of our lives. Because of its
Humans can be especially adap- generality and pervasiveness, there is also a lot that we don’t
tive to pain. People who have yet understand about it.
experienced painful injuries are
able to acclimate to and tolerate chronic pain. The
experience of pain is complex; the amount of pain
people experience not only depends on the intensity
of the injury but also on the context in which they
experience the pain and how they interpret it (in some
cases pain can be interpreted as a positive experience, riences, they do not adapt to the situation as readily
necessary for healing).
One type of human physical adaptation is called
hedonic adaptation—the process of getting used to
locations, homes, romantic partners, and almost
everything else in life. Over time, hedonic adaptation
levels out a person’s initial positive or negative emo-
tional perceptions. For example, someone moving
into a new house will be annoyed at first by a brightly
colored wall, but in time will hardly notice it anymore.
Also, a life-altering event such as a severe injury or
winning a lottery can have a huge impact initially on
over time. Researchers have shown that job satisfac-
tion is strongly correlated with changes in workers’
pay rather than the level of pay itself. Workers become
accustomed to their current pay level and are excited
to get a raise, no matter whether their pay level is high
or low.
Hedonic adaptation is an important quality for
humans. However, it can become a problem when
making decisions because it is difficult to predict
the level to which someone will adapt. Most people
miscalculate the extent or the speed with which they
will adapt to situations. They do not end up being as
happy as they thought they would when good things
happen, and they are not as sad as they expected when
bad things occur. Failing to anticipate this leveling
effect, consumers routinely escalate their purchases,
hoping that new stuff will make them feel happier.
However, the feeling is short-lived and eventually
wears off, prompting them to purchase additional
items—a cycle that is referred to as the hedonistic tread-
mill.
Researchers have found that when people take a
break during irritating or boring experiences their
ability to adapt to the situation decreases and they
are more displeased with the experience. Conversely,
when people take a break during pleasurable expe-
and therefore experience pleasure for a longer extent.
Knowing this, consumers could extend the pleasure
associated with new purchases by waiting until the
pleasure associated with one purchase subsides
before purchasing something else. Also, people could
maximize their overall satisfaction in life by shifting
their investments toward experiences that are more
difficult to adapt to, such as scuba-diving or going to
a concert.
Inserting serendipity or unpredictability into one’s
life is another way to heighten levels of enjoyment.

Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved Page 5
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely

People tend to take the safe and predictable paths in The market for single, young people to find partners
their work and personal lives to do things that pro- used to be centralized in a village where parents or
vide steady and reliable progress, but real progress elders helped pair up young people. Nowadays, how-
and real pleasure come from taking risks and trying ever, it is no longer organized in one location; young
different things. Each person must explore their indi- professionals relocate for education or work pur-
vidual patterns of adaptation to learn what influences poses and have to break off their direct and indirect
them and what does not. relationships, further hurting their chances of find-
ing someone. The onset of online
[C]ould it be that, in their desire to make the system compat- dating sites has started to meet the
ible with what computers can do well, online dating sites force needs of this no-longer-successful
our often nebulous conception of an ideal partner to conform market. However, most online
dating programs treat participants
to a set of simple parameters—and in the process make the
as searchable goods, as though
whole system less useful? they can be fully described by a
few attributes. In reality, people
Hot or Not?
cannot be characterized as easily and effectively as
People tend to associate with, date, and marry people these dating Web sites imply. The sites do not seem
like themselves. Social scientists have studied this to take into account the nuances of attraction and
birds-of-a-feather phenomenon for a long time and romance.
call it assortative mating. Qualities such as physical
Researchers found that participants of online dating
looks, wealth, power, and even a sense of humor can
sites were not very satisfied with the experience,
make a person more or less desirable. However, in
saying that the process was difficult, time-consum-
American society, beauty, more than other character-
ing, unintuitive, and only slightly informative. They
istics, defines one’s place in the social hierarchy and
suspected that the dissatisfaction stemmed from
one’s mating potential. Those who are not at the top of
the fact that only easily measurable characteristics
the beauty charts find ways to adapt, either by alter-
could be searched, such as height or education level.
ing their perception of what is aesthetically pleasing
In their experiments, they found that online dating
or reconsidering which attributes are more important
participants are more interested in learning about
and attractive to them. Of course, there are individu-
experiential attributes of potential partners, such as
als who never adapt and are continually disappointed
a passion for Golden Retrievers or a love of Monty
in their relationships.
Python skits. The results of the experiments showed
Researchers have shown that most people use the that the online market for single people should be
same standard to decide who they would consider structured to allow people to evaluate each other
beautiful or handsome. Additionally, most people with those characteristics that are more nuanced
are aware of their own level of attractiveness. In gen- and meaningful, not just eye color or favorite food.
eral, women pay less attention to a potential partner’s Creators of online dating sites, health insurance poli-
physical appearances than men do. Overall, humans’ cies, and retirement plans somehow forget about
adaptive talents give them the ability to change their people’s built-in limitations, thinking that people are
perspective, look past the physical, and discover and hyper-rational, know their own minds perfectly, can
love the characteristics of their partners. properly compare all options, and always choose the
When a Market Fails best course of action. In reality, people are sometimes
fallible, myopic, vindictive, and emotional. By under-
In broad terms, markets are coordinated systems that standing human limitations, companies can start
help people save time while they strive to achieve their improving information-based products and services.
goals. They are typically centralized and organized.
Markets are an integral part of life, are important to On Empathy and Emotion
the economy, and sometimes fail. Social scientists have sought to discover why humans

Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved Page 6
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely

will respond to the plight of one suffering individual Not Acting on Negative Feelings
more so than to a tragedy affecting large numbers
Human emotions are fleeting. People might get
of victims. People are more willing to spend money,
annoyed in a traffic jam, or be pleased by a gift, but
time, and effort to help suffering people that they can
their feelings will not last long. However, in some
identify with, yet they fail to act when confronted
cases, if they react impulsively in response to how
with statistical numbers about victims. Several factors
they feel, they might regret their behavior for a long
are involved with this phenomenon:
time. Sometimes people make decisions in the heat of
• The feeling of closeness or kinship one has with an emotional moment, and those decisions influence
the victim. their behavior long after the emotion has subsided.
Rarely can people remember exactly the emotional
• How vividly one experiences someone else’s suf-
state under which they made decisions; however,
fering.
they remember the actions they took. When people
• How much faith one has that efforts to help vic- act on their emotions, they make short-term decisions
tims will have a real impact. that have an effect on their long-term decisions. Even
Humans are emotional beings, and these factors residual emotional responses based on events in their
explain why they will respond to pleas to help a past can influence people’s decisions.
home-town girl needing an
operation but ignore calls to help
Many forces contribute to a general apathy toward large trag-
thousands of dying people in edies. They include…the fact that pain on the other side of
Africa. Researchers have found the world doesn’t register as readily as, say, our neighbors’.
that when people are encouraged Another big factor, it seems, has to do with the sheer size of the
to become less emotional and
more calculating about a tragic
tragedy—a concept expressed by none other than Joseph Stalin
situation, they do not increase when he said, “One man’s death is a tragedy, but a million
their concern for larger problems deaths is a statistic.”
but suppress their compassion in
general. By their nature, huge problems do not evoke Sometimes, people remember the actions they have
emotions or motivate people to act. With all the psy- taken in the past under certain circumstances and
chological forces working against a person’s tendency mindlessly repeat them. More often, people look to
to act, it is no surprise that problems continue to grow their past actions as a guide for what they should do
and few people are moved to solve them. next, following the same basic behavior pattern. This
If people are called to action only by individual, per- tendency suggests that the decisions humans make
sonalized suffering and are numbed when a problem on the basis of a momentary emotion can also influ-
is too huge to imagine, how can human society solve ence related choices and decisions in other areas of
large-scale humanitarian problems? One response their lives long after the original decision was made. If
might be to quickly produce emotion-evoking photo- an individual does nothing while feeling an emotion,
graphs and stories when a disaster happens in order there are no short-term or long-term consequences.
to propel people into action. When a crisis occurs, to This is why common wisdom admonishes people to
activate their emotions and help decide how to take “sleep on it” or “count to ten” before making deci-
action, people can try to imagine how specific indi- sions. However, if a person reacts to the emotion by
viduals might be suffering. Knowing the psychology making a decision, she may not only regret the imme-
behind how people respond to suffering and crisis, diate results but also continue to be misguided in
governments can make more reasonable decisions future behaviors.
and offer assistance to victims even when there is not Lessons from Irrationalities
an emotional response from their constituents.
Humans are susceptible to a formidable array of deci-

Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved Page 7
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely
sion biases, making it difficult for them to make really
big, important, life-changing decisions. Irrational-
ity plays a large role in people’s lives: in their habits,
their dating choices, their motivations at work, the
way they donate money, their attachment to things
and ideas, their ability to adapt, and their desire for
revenge. People are influenced by their irrational ten-
dencies more than they realize, which means they
do not fully understand what drives their behaviors.
Therefore, people need to doubt their intuitions. If
they continue to follow their gut feelings or do things
because they have always been done that way, they
will continue to make mistakes. If people can learn to
question themselves and test their beliefs, they might
actually discover when and how they are wrong and
improve the ways they love, live, work, innovate,
manage, and govern. This is where controlled experi-
ments can be beneficial to learn what really works
and what does not. Experiments are recognized as an
important tool in science, but not broadly recognized
as a tool for making important decisions in business
or public policy. Too often business people and poli-
ticians work off of their assumptions and intuitions
without testing them.
The upside of irrationality is that some of the ways
that people are irrational are also what makes them
wonderfully human. With this perspective, instead
of striving for perfect rationality, people can appreci-
ate those imperfections that benefit them, recognize
the ones they would like to overcome, and design the
world to take advantage of humans’ incredible abili-
ties while overcoming some of their limitations when
it comes to their ability to think and reason.
g g g g
Features of the Book
Reading Time: 5.5 hours, 334 pages
In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely reveals
the multiple biases that lead people to make unwise
decisions. He exposes the surprising negative and
positive effects that irrationality can have on people’s
lives. The book focuses on human behaviors at work
and in relationships, offering new insights and eye-
opening truths about what really motivates people on
the job, how one unwise action can become a long-
Business Book Summaries® April 24, 2012 • Copyright © 2012 EBSCO Publishing Inc. • All Rights Reserved
term habit, how people learn to love the ones they are
with, and other areas. Ariely uses data from his own
original experiments to draw conclusions about how
and why people behave the way they do. He explains
how to break through negative patterns of thought
and behavior to make better decisions. The book is
written in two parts: the first part addresses human
behaviors in the workplace while the second part dis-
cusses behaviors in interpersonal relationships. After
a cover-to-cover reading, readers can later return to
the extensive index to use the book as a reference. A
bibliography and a list of suggested reading helps
readers expand their knowledge beyond the scope of
the book.
Contents
Introduction: Lessons from Procrastination and Medical
Side Effects
Part I. The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at Work
Chapter 1: Paying More for Less: Why Big Bonuses
Don’t Always Work
Chapter 2: The Meaning of Labor: What Legos Can
Teach Us about the Joy of Work
Chapter 3: The IKEA Effect: Why We Overvalue What
We Make
Chapter 4: The Not-Invented-Here Bias: Why “My”
Ideas Are Better than “Yours”
Chapter 5: The Case for Revenge: What Makes Us
Seek Justice?
Part II: The Unexpected Ways We Defy Logic at
Home
Chapter 6: On Adaptation: Why We Get Used to
Things (but Not All Things, and Not Always)
Chapter 7: Hot or Not? Adaptation, Assortative
Mating, and the Beauty Market
Chapter 8: When a Market Fails: An Example from
Online Dating
Chapter 9: On Empathy and Emotion: Why We
Respond to One Person Who Needs Help but Not to
Many
Chapter 10: The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term
Page 8
The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely

Emotions: Why We Shouldn’t Act on Our Negative

Feelings
Chapter 11: Lessons from Our Irrationalities: Why We
Need to Test Everything
Thanks
List of Collaborators
Notes
Bibliography and Additional Readings
Index

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The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely

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