Predictably Irrational

­This book is about a study mostly by students of different American universities, of what people actually do when they buy, sell, marry and make other real-life decisions.

Ariely, professor and behavioral economist at MIT, designs clever approaches and ways of testing people through experiments. In particular, he surveyed and performed experiments with students at MIT and Berkeley. Some examples of examination objects are the placebo effect, procrastination, branding and the role of expectations.

The experiments concerning procrastination are especially very interesting, because the same holds true for me as well. Procrastination, in this context, means the act of postponing high-priority actions and putting off important tasks to a later time like homework such as larger projects which are due in a few weeks after the announcement.

I learned this phenomenon at school under the heading “Parkinson’s law.” This term has almost the same meaning – work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Retrospectively, I have already observed this procedure a few times (or maybe more than a few times) in my own life.  In the majority of cases, I start late with the handling of assignments for my classes, and I always finish those tasks just in time.

Nevertheless, one point of criticism is that the subject groups of the experiments are always students of American universities. Therefore, it is doubtful whether the results can be generalized to other people with the same age and different backgrounds such as students at universities of other countries, people of totally different ages or people who aren´t college students.  

Despite this one criticism, in my opinion, this is an excellent and also well-written book, and very enjoyable to read, and I would recommend it to everybody.