Dan Ariely provides an insightful, thought provoing look into how exactly our brain plays tricks on us as humans in his TED Talk. Ariely argues his point by presenting the audience with a picture of two tables next to each other. Now, at first glance, the table on the left appears to be longer. But, Ariely proved that they are in fact the same length. He goes on to argue that most of our decisions are made based on how they information I presented. He refers to this as “cognitive illusions”. Another example of cognitive illusion is a study that was conducted on advertisement customers of The Economist. When customers were presented with tree separate choices- a print only subscription for $89 a web only subscription for $125, or a web and print subscription for $125, most customers ended up choosing the third option. Web and print was the most popular choice because people thought they were getting a good deal considering it was the same price as a web subscription. However, when the third option, web and print, was removed, the customers preferred to choose the print only subscription for $89, because it was the cheaper option. This goes to show that how information and choices are presented to us truly do impact our decisions. Although it wasn’t directly mentioned in the TED talk, I believe that this talk relates to tragedy in the way of how often the characters fall for illusions. An example of this is in Oedipus, he was told that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother. This event was considered to be “fate”, and it drove all of Oedipus’ decisions throughout the entirety of the play.
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