The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you’re actually more and more likely to fail. Dan Ariely Read Quote
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. Dan Ariely Read Quote
In a world where everyone is behaving honestly, any dishonesty constitutes a big infraction. But, in a world where many people are behaving dishonestly, and the news is filled with stories of their infractions, even big infractions can feel small to the perpetrator. Dan Ariely Read Quote
I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them? Dan Ariely Read Quote
It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating – on our taxes or on the football field. Dan Ariely Read Quote
Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we’ve done so far, what mistakes we’ve made, and what improvements should come next. Dan Ariely Read Quote
Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don’t want to be honest all the time. Dan Ariely Read Quote
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. Dan Ariely Read Quote
Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, ‘No, this not real cheating.’ So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that’s what we find, is that we’re basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves. Dan Ariely Read Quote
It is true that from a behavioral economics perspective we are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So from this perspective it is rather depressing. But at the same time there is also a silver lining. There are free lunches! Dan Ariely Read Quote
