The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves
by Dan Ariely
Narrated by Simon Jones
Why You'll Love This
By chapter three, you'll have quietly admitted to yourself that you've done at least four of the things Ariely says everyone does.
- Great if you want: behavioral economics that implicates you personally
- Listening experience: conversational and cerebral — steady, thought-provoking pacing throughout
- Narration: Jones delivers Ariely's dry wit with composed, understated authority
- Skip if: you've already read Predictably Irrational — significant overlap
About This Book
Dan Ariely argues that human dishonesty follows predictable, irrational patterns that have nothing to do with rational cost-benefit calculations about getting caught. Drawing on behavioral economics experiments conducted across diverse populations, he examines why people cheat in small, socially acceptable ways but rarely commit large, obvious fraud; why moral reminders reduce cheating; and how institutional structures and social norms either constrain or enable dishonest behavior. The book connects personal ethics to institutional design.
Simon Jones narrates with the alert, engaged quality that Ariely's empirical storytelling style demands. His voice conveys the specific pleasure of social science research that reveals something counterintuitive about behavior we all participate in, and he handles the experimental descriptions in ways that make the methodology clear without making it tedious. Ariely's material works exceptionally well in audio because the research anecdotes are essentially spoken-word stories about human behavior caught in the act.
