Professional Skills: Decision making

We weigh every significant decision based on how it will affect our future. But when it comes to figuring that out, we mostly make the process up as we go along. While financial professional Peter Neuwirth can't help you actually predict the future, he can offer a simple, systematic way to make much better guesses about it--and so make better decisions.

Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin? In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes.