Payoff: The hidden forces behind our motivations by Dan Ariely
So far, Ariely hasn’t missed a beat in dowsing me with new information in his books, and his book Payoff (which is about motivations even though the title doesn’t suggest it) is short and to the point, and though he does go into a much more storytelling tone when he’s telling an anecdote he wants us to remember, he is good at it. The book is a series of questions about motivations, answered through the form of experiments he is able to carry out at the university he works at. The questions lead on from one another, and give the book a coherent feeling. A lot of the things that he discusses are present in his earlier books, and one point he just takes an entire paragraph from Predictably Irrational and quotes it in this book, which some might consider as cheating, but I really liked the links between them. All in all, a solid book that reinforces a lot about how humans work, and introduces some clever new ideas too.
Gingerjumble 