Few people would care to accept the fact that the decisions they take in a particular situation are anything but the best possible or what they brushed aside as irrational could actually have been otherwise.
In The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, behavioural economist and Duke University professor Dan Ariely, known for his bestselling book Predictably Irrational, attempts to mellow the rationale we apply in deciding what is rational and what is not.
“We humans are fond of the notion that we are objective, rational and logical,” he agrees but questions the very basic thinking that has always been taken as “obvious”, and goes on to prove how this is so obviously just the opposite. He encourages his readers to try unusual things, which may have always appeared illogical to rational minds, and goes on to prove how these may be, after all, much better things to do. But for a few instances in which the ideas he expounds do not appear convincing and practical, Ariely’s pursuit in defying logic and creating a paranormal normal makes an interesting read.
Drawing from his daily experiences and weaving anecdotes from his experiments and hypotheses, Ariely brings the book closer to readers’ experiences and makes it easy to relate with. The reader is not required to strain her imagination too much to tease sense out of the situations he presents.
To highlight the irrationality in the common urge to take revenge, Ariely describes an experiment in which participants are given a situation that a stranger has a fixed sum of money and he has to decide what portion of it he would like to share with them. A participant can either take the amount offered to him and let the stranger have the rest, or reject the offer, in which case both he and the stranger would get nothing. Had the participant in this case — and people in general — been “perfectly rational”, she would have taken any amount offered, because that would certainly be better than nothing at all. Most people would likely reject a disproportionate offer, only to exact revenge on the stranger. Ariely says we are biologically hardwired to seek revenge because the pleasure centres of the brain are activated during the act of revenge.
For businesses in particular, Ariely shows how big-buck bonuses actually lead to steep decline in executives’ performance. You thought bonuses were meant to motivate people to put in more and perform better. Ariely shows, with examples, how the amount of bonus is inversely proportional to performance. His findings show small and medium bonuses certainly enhance performance, fat ones don’t.
The book also suggests that employees seek meaning in their work, which should essentially go beyond financial compensation. They tend to become demoralised by an inability to see their contribution in the larger scheme of things. So, even as it is considered structurally good and rational to value specialisation and segregates staff in specific departments, the smart way to follow for any company would be “to impart a sense of meaning not just through vision statements but by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged”.
Playing on ownership bias or the Ikea effect, another work-related theme that most people are aware of but few realise, Ariely shows that people tend to attach more value to things they create or help create — even if these are sub-standard in quality, quantity or aesthetics — than those created by others. In one experiment, every participant is asked to make an origami animal and then say how much she would be ready to pay for it. This price is then compared to the price offered by others for the same article. It is found that the makers of these were ready to shell out as much as five times the amount non-makers would pay. The same “ownership bias” is present in the realm of ideas, with people overvaluing their own ideas and being inclined to find faults with and trash others’. The same goes with decisions and solutions one comes up with: “Any solution, as long as it’s mine.”
Another amusing, and yet quite convincing, finding of the book is the relation between adaptability and pleasure. It says people are “stunningly adaptive” and tries to establish that it is not such a good thing, after all. Instances of pleasure do not keep us high for a long time because we adapt to them. So, adaptability — widely thought to be man’s greatest virtue — puts a damper on his own desire to draw pleasure from fluent experiences in life. Who would have thought about it this way? Ariely suggests that pleasure should be slowed down, even interrupted, so that its impact can be sustained over a period of time.
A fair mix of light-hearted critique of normal human behaviour and spirited alternatives to them, The Upside of Irrationality is an intriguing book, even as it strays into elaborate deliberations on quite unsurprising findings on a few occasions.
THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY
The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Dan Ariely
Harper Collins
334 pages; Rs 399
