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People Are Predictably Interested In More Than Money, 22 April 2008
Only a professor of behavioral economics would conclude that when people respond to motives other than money they are being predictably irrational. If you want to see some clever experiments that demonstrate that people are interested in things other than money, read this book.
I would like to observe, however, that such experiments have to be taken with a grain of salt when people know that they are experiments or reflect unexpected questions rather than serious looks at on-going behavior in areas where people have a lot of experience. For instance, the book looks at whether and at what price Duke students will sell basketball tickets they have just put a lot of effort into getting. Clearly, there are factors other than profit that motivated the buying in the first place. Most students probably wanted to get lucky and go to the game. Selling a ticket under these circumstances denies the opportunity to go to the game. A ticket broker would make a rational decision about whether to hire students to try get a ticket this way, but a student who does this a few times wouldn't. Study the ticket broker and you'll get more economic behavior. Study the student who wants to go the game and you won't. So why should we be surprised?
I remember being a subject of a lot of these experiments as a student. If the experiment struck me as particularly stupid, I would often feel rebellious and do things to act in noneconomic ways just to prove I was a person. I didn't see that effects like those are being studied here.
If you want to learn about human behavior, I suggest you study all of the motives . . . not just try to understand the economic motives.
In addition, some of the experiments probably depend in part on the common meaning of certain words being different than the definition that a professor would use. I think the experiments about certainty and probability wording may be tainted by that problem.
Professor Ariely is a clever fellow, but I think he stretches his conclusions further than they deserve. He's also interested in finding ways to make people look stupid rather than appreciating the genius that most people exhibit routinely. I couldn't help feeling that there was too much economic motive in his desire to write this book (a P.T. Barnum approach rather than trying to truly educate).
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