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Are we in control of our decisions? | Dan Ariely

TED · 2.2M views · 2009-05-19 · 17:27

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Overview

In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses visual illusions and his research to show that people are less rational in their decisions than they think. He covers defaults, such as organ donation rates, and how choice framing steers decisions.

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Used to illustrate predictable irrationality, such as defaults and the effect of the middle option among three choices.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2011–2017

Topics

Microeconomics & behavioral economicsPsychology & human behavior
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dan arielyirrationalitydefaultsdecision makingted

What people said

jason_pomerleau · 2017-04 · Recommendation

> 7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. Dan Ariely has a great talk on "decision illusions"(1) that goes into more depth on this topic. He starts off with visual illusion as a metaphor for rationality: "So if we have these repeatable and predictable mistakes with vision, which we are so good at, what's the chance we don't make even more mistakes with something we're not as good at?" (1) [VIDEO]

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dhruval · 2011-05 · Recommendation

I wouldn't label it stupidity or ignorance, but it is a weel documented quirk of human behavior the default state of opt in / opt out systems makes a huge difference. This ted talk is an excellent and talks about the very significant differences in organ donation rates between countries that use an opt out system vs. those that use an opt in. [VIDEO]

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fizixer · 2016-02 · Reference

Question to deep learning practitioners: Is there any research on comparing the 99.9% confidence about something wrong, to the human weakness of 'optical illusion'? If you watch a few minutes of this Dan Ariely TED Talk [1], we humans are fooled into near certainty that the table on the left has longer vertical distance that the horizontal distance of that on the right. Even after the speaker shows this is not the case, we still "confidently see" the wrong thing. (not to mention, we suffer from non-optical illusions as well, like cognitive biases, and fallacious reasoning, as shown later in the talk). It seems to me you guys have discovered 'machine optical illusion'. It's just that the machine has illusions about something completely different. I believe exploring the space of architectures/weights/what-not might lead towards making a machine get into the same kind of optical illusions as the human visual system gets into. At the least, it looks like a very promising research direction to me. [1] [VIDEO]

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