Are we in control of our decisions? | Dan Ariely
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used to illustrate predictable irrationality, such as defaults and the effect of the middle option among three choices.
What it is
In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses visual illusions and his research to show that people are less rational in their decisions than they think. He covers defaults, such as organ donation rates, and how choice framing steers decisions.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2011 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dhruval · 2011-05 · 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. [this video]
Recommends jason_pomerleau · 2017-04 · 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) [this video]
Cites politician · 2012-12 · 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] [this video]
Cites moloch · 2013-03 · 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] [this video]
Cites fizixer · 2016-02 · on “How convolutional neural networks see the world”
Question to deep learning practitioners: Is there any research on comparing the 99.9% confidence about something wrong, to the human weakness of 'optical illusion'? If you watch a few minutes of this Dan Ariely TED Talk [1], we humans are fooled into near certainty that the table on the left has longer vertical distance that the horizontal distance of that on the right. Even after the speaker shows this is not the case, we still "confidently see" the wrong thing. (not to mention, we suffer from non-optical illusions as well, like cognitive biases, and fallacious reasoning, as shown later in the talk). It seems to me you guys have discovered 'machine optical illusion'. It's just that the mach