Perfectly irrational

Dan Ariely, a social scientist, examines why people act against their own interest at work and in love, and whether those lapses always do harm. The book follows his earlier Predictably Irrational, which catalogued the biases behind unwise decisions. This time he looks at what irrationality can do for us as well as to us.

The questions he takes up are concrete. A large bonus can make a chief executive less productive. Confusing directions can turn out to help. Revenge matters a great deal to people. We guess badly at what will make us happy, and the gap between that guess and the truth is wide.

Ariely works from experiments he designed and ran himself, and he reports their data to support his conclusions. The subjects fall into three areas: office attitudes and what motivates people on the job, romantic relationships, and the search for purpose in life. Along the way he covers how one unwise act can harden into a long-term habit and how people come to love the partners they have.

This is popular non-fiction in the behavioural science vein, written for general readers. It also offers practical advice on breaking negative patterns of thought and behaviour to make better decisions, at work and at home. The tone is entertaining and curious, and the argument is that irrational behaviour deserves a more nuanced reading than it usually gets.