Irrational Decision Making Quotes

I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.

The passions of men are commonly more potent than their reason.

It doesn't have the ability to think rationally this economic model. It thinks like a drug addict: 'Where can I get my next fix?' It doesn't learn wisely. Any kind of measure of natural wisdom would be: you make a mistake, you correct it the next time around. But a drug addict feels terrible... and then says: 'I want more'. Unfortunately we have an economic model that thinks like a crack addict.

...following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality was like following a burning fuse in search of an explosive.

But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms.

The world supports a multi-million dollar industry of intelligence and ability research, but it devotes virtually nothing to determine why this intelligence is squandered by engaging in amazing, breathtaking acts of stupidity.

The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory.

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness -

Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you've got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away... I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.

A nudge is some feature of the environment that changes the behaviour of humans but would not change the behaviour of rational economic agents, what we call Econs.

At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it. I laid down the largest stake allowe-four thousand gulden-and lost it. Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it on the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me.

The plain fact is religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key deciscions made by religious people. By irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state, not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

An event in the present evokes past sensations. But science couldn't explain how a foolish heart had the power to overrule common sense.

You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.

Tastes and behavior are important in economics. Nobody denies that. But the question is: How much of behavior is irrational, and how much of the irrational behavior really affects prices? It turns out that's very difficult to answer.

Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

People react not very wisely sometimes.

The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love. all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence

Add a sprinkling of folly to your long deliberations.