Carolina QuotesI mean, today you probably will have some opportunities to take stuff and put it in your backpack, and nobody would know. You could take some silverware, there’s cups, there’s all kinds of things you could take home with nobody noticing, and no probability of being caught. If you’re a rational economist you would say, you should take all those options, there’s opportunity! But of course you think differently — if you did that, you’d feel you’re a bad person, and that’s what’s stopping you. The curious thing is that what stops us, doesn’t stop us from doing everything. We have a fudge factor, we have an ability to rationalize some dishonesty and as long as we cheat just a little bit, we can still rationalize it.
Dan Ariely Connected to the Carolinas
Source
WHY WE LIE, GO TO PRISON AND EAT CAKE: 10 QUESTIONS WITH DAN ARIELY, Wired.com (June 22, 2012)
- year
- 2012
Cite this record
“I mean, today you probably will have some opportunities to t…” Dan Ariely. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-A68ABFD088. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/a68abfd088
More from Dan Ariely
What we find is that lots of people can cheat a little bit. If we cheat a lot, we … face the possibility that we will feel bad about ourselves. So we play a game within ourselves.Sometimes we think about game theory as kind of a game between two parties. It is also a game within a person. You say to yourself, I want to think of myself as a good, honest, wonderful person. I selfishly want to benefit from dishonesty. It turns out that you can cheat a little bit and still feel good about yourself. That is the general lesson that we find.
Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is. Why? I think it's because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss
One of the basic principles from behavioral economics is the environment matters. If you think about it, what is our environment trying to do? You’re walking down the street, you’re walking in the mall, in every shopping entity, in every advertisement, all of them want something from you. And what they want from you is not your long-term well-being. What they want is your time, money and attention right now. It’s getting harder and harder because our apps are on the phone, websites’ [ads] are popping so this question of resisting temptation is something that is becoming more and more difficult.