*Disclaimer: The following is a summary and/or review based on the authors understanding of the book. Also, a note on the grammatical error in the title – it should have been “we’re only half as smart as we think we’re!” to maintain subject parallelism in comparative sentence.
A friend once told me that the Irish dictionary does NOT contain the word ‘gullible’. But it turns out that the art of driving human behavior is so subtle and instantaneous that our brain is way past the decision before one can completely pronounce the word ‘gullible’.
Dr. Ariely lucidly explains the experiments conducted to understand complex human behavior, citing numerous experimental results and real life experiences that validate or form basis for such hypothesis. It will make you realize that despite our best efforts to apply logic, certain cues just instinctively trigger our brains to behave irrationally! But most importantly, it also explains how businesses and marketers leverage, as well as exploit, such behavior to make us spend more.
This reminded me of a particular incident when one of my clients justified the purchase of his new Mercedes. He said that his purchase was in fact saving him money as the depreciation and loan interest offered him tax savings amounting to one-third of the value. Although this is as absurd as it sounds, I refrained to tell him that this was non-sense and only told him that without the Mercedes he would have been two-thirds richer!
Moreover, as we humans think, or sometimes pretend, of ourselves as smart and rational we end up amplifying these logical fallacies. Everyone wants to be wise purchaser rather than accept the fact that he or she got outwitted by a car sales man. And sometimes such explanations are just a way to mellow down our post purchase guilt. Once you are aware of these red flags, you should have the opportunity to save time and money, and if not then cautiously let yourself get lured in to the marketers’ screenplay.
In addition, this book also illustrates the inherent characteristics that are hard wired in our brains, owing to hundreds of years of evolution in the wild. Despite the drastic change in context over the last five decades, our brains still follow the characteristics developed to cope up in the centuries old socioeconomic environment. This may sound humbug, but apart from behavior even most bodily functions follow such characteristic behavior.
For instance, our body still stores calories as a measure to cope up with prolonged period of food deprivation that is normal life in the jungle – the effect is prolonged calorie deprivation through diet control compels your brain to increase its fat reserve as it prepares for more adverse situations or longer and more intense calorie deprivation. So if you did not know why people end up heavier when they get off diet, here is the answer!
So what? Well, certain inherent characteristics act against us since the context has changed. For instance, human brain has greatest tendency to gravitate towards comfort zone, which is safe if you are living in a jungle but in today’s context – growth happens outside of the comfort zone. This is better explained by Abhijeet Banerjee illustrating the unique psychology of immigrants in his book ‘Good Economics for Bad Times’. Being aware of it will help you to at least avoid the ones that are not impromptu and not suffer from the obsolete blessings of our ancestors.
And if not anything else, it will certainly help you resist the temptation to purchase two pairs of expensive denim in order to get the fourth cheap T-shirt for FREE!
Opinions are welcome!
Header Image Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
Savvy Munshi 
1 Comment
Comments are closed.