Sidetracked
Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
You may not realize it but simple, irrelevant factors can have profound consequences on your decisions and behavior, often diverting you from your original plans and desires. Sidetracked will help you identify and avoid these influences so the decisions you make do stick—and you finally reach your intended goals.
Psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino has long studied the factors at play when judgment and decision making collide with the results of our choices in real life. In this book she explores inconsistent decisions played out in a wide range of circumstances—from our roles as consumers and employees (what we buy, how we manage others) to the choices that we make more broadly as human beings (who we date, how we deal with friendships). From Gino’s research, we see when a mismatch is most likely to occur between what we want and what we end up doing. What factors are likely to sway our decisions in directions we did not initially consider? And what can we do to correct for the subtle influences that derail our decisions? The answers to these and similar questions will help you negotiate similar factors when faced with them in the real world.
For fans of Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman, this book will help you better understand the nuances of your decisions and how they get derailed—so you have more control over keeping them on track.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
We've all made decisions and plans with the best of intentions: to save for retirement, to search for a better job, to go on a diet. However, we're surprisingly bad at anticipating our own behavior and at sticking to those well-intentioned decisions. Harvard Business School professor and psychologist Gino investigates the behavior psychology behind this self-defeating behavior, and describes the forces that influence our decisions "forces within ourselves," "forces from our relationships with others," and "forces from the outside world." In lively prose, Gino describes experiments conducted with students, observing as despite their best intentions they get caught up in contagious emotions, focus too narrowly, fail to take the perspective of those around them into account, and form unproductive social bonds. If only we could acknowledge and recognize "the forces that derail decisions," as Gino advocates, we could try to make better decisions and stick to them. Though the book is pitched to fans of Dan Ariely, Gino's style and execution is much like his, and some experiments are even repeated and may not feel fresh.