100+ Dan Ariely Quotes On Happiness, Identity And Data

Professor Dan Ariely is a world-renowned behavioral economist and author. He is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and the founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is best known for his books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Dan Ariely on happiness, identity, data.

Top 10 Dan Ariely Quotes

1. Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.
2. One of the big lessons from behavioral economics is that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in.
3. Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.
4. The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.
5. Your immediate environment is comprised of coffee shops, supermarkets, websites, apps and all kinds of things - none of which have an interest in your long-term or short-term financial well-being.
6. Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination.
7. 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.
8. A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.
9. People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.
10. People are irrational - and predictably so.

Dan Ariely Short Quotes

• The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.
• It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.
• Not all debt is bad. From time to time we should get into debt when there's a good reason for that.
• What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.
• With everything you do, in fact, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors.
• Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don't want to be honest all the time.
• But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?
• Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.
• that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.
• individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them (including their desire to please others)

Dan Ariely Quotes About Making Decisions

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. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

None of us always make the best financial decisions. — Dan Ariely

If you think of people as making decisions actively, every time we think about the cup of coffee, we say, "How much will I enjoy the cup of coffee, what else could I not do in the future because I buy this cup of coffee? — Dan Ariely

We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely Quotes About Motivation

When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it - meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc. — Dan Ariely

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

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

If you ever go bar hopping, who do you want to take with you? You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. Similar ... but slightly uglier. — Dan Ariely

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

The things that motivate us are to help other people, to feel that we're useful, to feel that we're getting better, to feel that we are kind of living to our potential, to get a sense of meaning. All of those things are positive. — Dan Ariely

Companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees. — Dan Ariely

In total, by giving people $30 bonus, Intel lost almost 5 percent of productivity. That's a lot. Now, think about it. You give money because you think this would increase motivation. It actually decreases motivation. — Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely Famous Quotes And Sayings

...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion. — Dan Ariely

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 Ariely

We usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves, than with reality. — Dan Ariely

Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected. — Dan Ariely

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

For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively. — Dan Ariely

The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund. — Dan Ariely

Once you break the social norm and create a new social norm, all of a sudden it can stay with us for a long time. — Dan Ariely

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

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. — Dan Ariely

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

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

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. — Dan Ariely

The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don't see how our conflicts of interest work on us. — Dan Ariely

In 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

The companies that provide debt, what do you think their goal is? Is their goal for you to fully understand the cost of your debt? No. So they're basically creating these approaches to make you feel like it is incredibly cheap or just to think about the cost per day rather the cost per year or cost for a lifetime. So debt is very simple mistake. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy. — Dan Ariely

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

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. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

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

Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else. — Dan Ariely

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? — Dan Ariely

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." — Dan Ariely

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them? — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

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 — Dan Ariely

When people are in severe pain, there's an expression, you're a "pain person," and what that means is that nothing else matters. — Dan Ariely

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

We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things - our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better. — Dan Ariely

Why would you take money out of your paycheck at the beginning of the month when you don't know how much money you'll need? — Dan Ariely

The people who need to overcome temptation to the highest degree have the hardest time doing it. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

The real issue is, how much goodwill do you invest in the work? And goodwill is not something that we can buy with money. It's very hard to buy goodwill with money. — Dan Ariely

The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

Money is a wonderful invention. It lets us save, it lets us specialize, right? I couldn't be a professor if there wasn't any money. Every day I would have to raise chicken and bread and broccoli and go ahead and spend all my time trading. So, money is a wonderful mechanism. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are. — Dan Ariely

We don't really want a huge house, but we want the house to be slightly bigger than our neighbors, and a car that is bigger than our neighbor's, and they're going on vacation that's slightly more expensive, and this escalation happens that things got out of hand. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better. — Dan Ariely

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance. — Dan Ariely

Scaling down individually is very hard. Imagine that if you go to a place where everybody is dressed nicely, and you are the only one who doesn't dress nicely. Everybody goes on vacations to a great place and you go to the Jersey shore. It's very hard to do these things without an organized mechanism, but it looks to me like there might be some organized mechanisms. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

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

When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations ... we could design a better world. — Dan Ariely

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

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

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. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

That’s a lesson we can all learn: the more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity. — Dan Ariely

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. — Dan Ariely

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

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea - whether it’s 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 can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology - rigid and unyielding. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you're actually more and more likely to fail. — Dan Ariely

Do you know how much money you would save if you changed your light bulb to compact florescent light bubs? How much would you save if you decreased your temperature of your house in the winter by one degree, or increase it by one degree? We just don't know these numbers, but I think displays could make it a memorable change in terms of attention, and also help us translate it in terms of concrete ways on what you can get. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

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

I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. We're less productive as individuals. We're less productive as companies, and we're more miserable. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

If you get people to feel that they are putting something, that they are creating it and so on, their love for the project would increase. The more something is yours, the more you're willing to invest in it. — Dan Ariely

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. — Dan Ariely

Life Lessons by Dan Ariely

1. We can learn to be mindful of our decisions and actions, as they have consequences that can be difficult to predict or undo.
2. We can also learn to take responsibility for our mistakes and learn from them, instead of trying to blame external factors for our failures.
3. Finally, we can learn to recognize and appreciate the power of our emotions and how they can influence our decisions and behavior.