Yesterday I went to Town Hall Seattle to hear Dan Ariely talking about his new book, “Predictably Irrational”. He has a blog, here, which includes rather disconcerting reflections on the process of giving a book reading, and a delightfully strange (?strangely delightful) website here. There was a pretty full house at Town Hall, and I didn’t wait to buy an autographed copy of the book; fortunately it is available for the Kindle.
Rather than describing Dan’s work, I’ll let him speak for himself:

Dan writes, and speaks, in a very accessible and witty style, and it’s easy to enjoy his work on a purely personal level, laughing as we recognize how “predictably irrational” we are. But of course there’s a lot more to it than that; like Colin McGinn in “Mindfucking”, Dan shows us very clearly how easily our decisions can be manipulated.
An example, from Dan’s talk: Commonsense would suggest that if you are trying to choose between two items with somewhat different attributes, the addition of a third item which is worse in every respect than each of the other two should make no difference whatsoever. But commonsense would be wrong.
Highly recommended (especially for web-site designers!).