A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior — Dan Ariely
Online course archive
A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
"A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior" was an<br>online course I taught through Coursera in 2013, and<br>ran again in 2014. Each time, almost 200,000 people<br>from around the world signed up — and over the years<br>I've kept meeting them. At airports, at conferences,<br>in restaurants and on planes. They tell me the<br>course was useful to them, that it changed how they<br>thought about their own decisions, and they ask me,<br>often, where they can find it now. I wanted there to<br>be an answer.
The course is an introduction to behavioral<br>economics: the study of why human beings — who like<br>to think of themselves as rational creatures — make<br>so many decisions that work against their own<br>interests. About money, about work, about food,<br>about health, about love and risk and time and<br>almost everything else. Across six weeks we look at<br>the systematic ways our intuitions mislead us, the<br>experiments that have made those failures visible,<br>and the practical ways we can design around them.
I taught the course because I think behavioral<br>economics is most useful when you actually use it.<br>This site is here so you can.
Most of the work for this course was done by<br>Aline Grueneisen-Holzwarth . It was<br>really her project and I mostly did what I was told.<br>We are both grateful to<br>Matthew Duckworth for his amazing<br>help in filming and editing the material.
Start with the introduction<br>Browse the weeks
Course Promo
A 90‑second taste of what the course is about.
Introduction
An overview of the course and the questions it<br>tries to answer.
Visual and Decision Illusions
Defaults
Do We Know Our Preferences?
Choice Sets and Relativity
The Long‑lasting Effects of Decisions
Learning from Our Mistakes
Opportunity Cost
Relativity
The Pain of Paying
Mental Accounting
Fairness and Reciprocity
Loss Aversion and the Endowment Effect
Market and Social Norms
The Price of FREE
Micro‑payments
The Simple Model of Rational Crime
Shrinking and Expanding the Fudge Factor
Conflicts of Interest
Cheating Over Time and Across Cultures
Extrinsic versus Intrinsic Motivation
Meaning
Acknowledgement
The IKEA Effect
Not‑Invented‑Here Bias
Cognitive Dissonance
Monetary Stress and Performance
Social Stress and Performance
Bonuses, Labor and Motivation
Difficulty with Self‑Control
Reward Substitution
Ulysses Contracts
The Importance of Self‑Control: The<br>Individual and the Environment
Two Systems
Intra‑empathy Mismatch
The Identifiable Victim Effect
Emotional Decision Making
Risk Assessment
Conclusion
A closing reflection on what behavioral<br>economics is good for.
Lalin Anik
Lionel Messi meets Salvador Dali: A<br>motivation(al) story
Lalin Anik studies the things, beyond money,<br>that pull human beings toward their work — and<br>the surprising weight of small social rewards.<br>In this talk she draws an unlikely line between<br>Lionel Messi and Salvador Dali to make a single<br>argument: motivation isn't a problem of paying<br>people more, it is a problem of designing for<br>what they already care about. If your own work<br>has started to feel repetitive, or you manage<br>people whose work has, this lecture is a useful<br>set of small, practical tools — most of which<br>cost nothing and many of which are routinely<br>ignored.
Nina Mazar
Do Green Products Make Us Better People?
Nina Mazar's work asks an uncomfortable<br>question: do good deeds make us better, or do<br>they license us to behave a little worse? In a<br>now‑classic study, she and Chen‑Bo Zhong showed<br>that simply being exposed to green products made<br>people more altruistic — but actually purchasing<br>one made them more likely to lie and steal in<br>subsequent tasks. The talk walks through the<br>result and what it implies for everything from<br>corporate social responsibility programs to your<br>own running mental ledger of "I've earned this."<br>Moral self‑image, it turns out, is something we<br>spend down as well as build up.
Peter McGraw
What Makes Things Funny?
Peter McGraw runs the Humor Research Lab at the<br>University of Colorado Boulder, and has spent<br>years trying to do something most academics will<br>not: take humor seriously as a research problem.<br>His "benign violation" theory proposes that<br>things are funny when they are simultaneously a<br>violation of how things should be and benign in<br>their consequences — too much violation and it's<br>offensive, too little and it's boring. The<br>lecture is part theory and part live<br>demonstration, and along the way it changes how<br>you'll listen to comedy. It also, quietly, says<br>something useful about how to give a memorable<br>presentation.
David Pizarro
The Surprising Way Disgust Shapes Our Thinking
David Pizarro's research starts from an<br>evolutionary observation: disgust evolved to<br>keep us away from contaminated food and disease.<br>But the same emotional system, he argues, has<br>been quietly recruited into much more abstract<br>domains — moral judgment, consumer choice, and<br>political...