Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational, a book by Daniel Ariely, is an offering from the late capitalist mindset, which presents its thesis with mindboggling simplicity: "If humans had internalised no social values whatsoever, except for those of capitalist materialism, how might we expect them to behave?

The answer -- wait for it -- is obvious, as it is the title of the book that Ariely has written.

Ariely finds these tokens of irrationality everywhere. He finds them in the fact that college males' values shift towards denial of the need to concern themselves with contraception when they are aroused (as compared to the values that they emote when they are not turned on.) He finds this irrationality in the disinclination of his wife to enjoy an epidural-free childbirth, despite having stuck her hand into some icy water for a long time, in preparation for confronting the labour pain. (As a skydive instructor once said to me, when I suggested to him that I could learn to skydive by working my way up, jumping from a 10 metre board, "don't bother. The two sensations are entirely different!") He finds irrationality in that some people are easily tricked into buying products or services they really don't need, if they think they're getting something extra, in the bargain, for nothing. However, Ariely holds, if they are getting a discount, they feel like they're not really getting something worth cherishing. They are thus "predictably irrational".

The examples he has chosen might well be considered peculiar, no less the conclusions he draws from his experiments, about "human nature". Ariely doesn't see fit to tell us, for instance, why it is that a woman might choose to go without an epidural during childbirth, in the first place. This we are presumed to already know. Perhaps we can emotionally attune ourselves to this poor woman's motivations by using the universalism that is somehow waiting readily within our "human nature" for just such interpretative tasks.

Ariely finds that people prefer the middle of the range value in terms of cheating (they will steal a little, but not much) and when it comes to buying objects for sale (they will choose the goods that are priced between the highly priced object and the low costing object). When it comes to cheating in tests, people will, however, tend to cheat less if they are forced to think about the "ten commandments" just prior to the testing. However, they may not know what the contents of the ten commandments are, Ariely says. What is happening, in effect, is that an alternative value system from that of the hegemonic one -- capitalism -- is simply latching on to minds and taking hold of them. To introduce the bible into human interactions might be a good thing, thinks Ariely. (At least we can be reassured,on the basis of all that Ariely has been trying to tell us, that such an introduction would be merely irrational -- and hence, presumably, inconsequential -- just like everything else in a system that is organised on the basis of capital.

People -- the author seems to be trying to tell us -- are irrational things. This goes for their morality and everything about them. We might try to tweak things here or there to make them seem more moral on the surface, however genuine ethics, as well as genuine education and thinking about things in a way that doesn't change with every shift of the emotion, is impossible.

I think that Ariely should have admitted that he is speaking only of what he has known, and his overview of how the denial of thinking is taken as "human nature" under capitalism gives us a great deal to feel angry about.