Amazing Decisions
The Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Dan Ariely, the New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, and illustrator Matt R. Trower present a playful graphic novel guide to better decision-making, based on the author’s groundbreaking research in behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology.
The internationally renowned author Dan Ariely is known for his incisive investigations into the messy business of decision-making. Now, in Amazing Decisions, his unique perspective—informed by behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology—comes alive in the graphic form. The illustrator Matt R. Trower’s playful and expressive artwork captures the lessons of Ariely’s groundbreaking research as they explore the essential question: How can we make better decisions?
Amazing Decisions follows the narrator, Adam, as he faces the daily barrage of choices and deliberations. He juggles two overlapping—and often contradictory—sets of norms: social norms and market norms. These norms inform our thinking in ways we often don’t notice, just as Adam is shadowed by the “market fairy” and the “social fairy,” each compelling him to act in certain ways. Good decision-making, Ariely argues, requires us to identify and evaluate the forces at play under different circumstances, leading to an optimal outcome. Amazing Decisions is a fascinating and entertaining guide to developing skills that will prove invaluable in personal and professional life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fraught process of decision making is given a jaunty exploration in this perkily drawn graphic handbook. Behavioral economist Ariely (Predictably Irrational) presents his theories through the characters of energetic scientist Dana and befuddled Adam, who thinks he has to choose between two sets of norms. One is represented by the market fairy (who flits around in a suit and tosses off statements like "We thrive through competition and the free market") and the other by the social fairy ("You completely missed the point of a social exchange!"). In basic drawings, Adam is walked through the balancing of social and market forces required to negotiate the tricky territories of friendship, families, and gift giving (hint: don't offer to pay your mother for Thanksgiving dinner, no matter what the market fairy says). Thereafter, Dana overviews social science experiments, which have shown how people react to motivation in complicated and nonintuitive ways. For instance, subjects in one test worked less hard on a routine computer problem when offered money than those offered nothing. In another example, simple social reminders incentivized better than punishments. This easy-reading guide is a useful addition to the pop social-science canon, likely to get clipped for slideshow presentations from classrooms to boardrooms.
