I've been reading this book called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It's great and I've enjoyed it a lot so far. Very interesting read.
But to back up a little, I participated in an experiment several weeks ago for some people's thesis project. It was a paid experiment, which was nice. Anyway, they were studying cheating and kind of drew their inspiration from Ariely. A few weeks later, I went to see their thesis defense, mainly just to find out what the heck the experiment was all about and also because Ariely was coming to speak.
Here's one of his TED talks: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
He passed out books after his lecture and I've been slowly making my way through that. Anyway, now that that roundabout explanation is out of the way, I figure I'd share something he said that I found interesting during his lecture.
Ariely spoke about global warming and how it was perfect...if you wanted to design a problem that nobody cared about. He listed a few reasons, and they all made sense. It's a problem that won't have major ramifications in our lifetime. Not only that, but every effort we make to fight it is just a drop in the bucket. Also, we don't know the victims. Of course we know conceptually that it will be our descendants (or rather our descendants' descendants), but we can't even attach a name or face to any of them because they're so far off.
Not that I personally care too much about global warming, but it was interesting to think about it from this perspective. Honestly, I found most of what Ariely had to say, both in his lecture and book, to be really fascinating because of the way he approaches things as a behavioral economist. Why do placebos work? How do our expectations affect our perceptions? Why do we go crazy over anything and everything that's free? I'd definitely recommend checking it out.
Happy Earth Day!
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