This month’s Financial Post Business Magazine has a small article inspired by Dan Ariely’s new book Predictably Irrational. Much like How Doctors Think, this book appears to look at how humans think, and the more we know about those processes the better we can test software by countering built-in human blind spots.

Here are some of the points that make this book seem interesting.

  • When you want to believe something, you will shape reality to fit very much what you want to see.
  • There is something in the human mind that overpowers logic with the immutable desire to believe something true, despite evidence to the contrary.
  • It would be naive to assume such pleasing effects (from placebos) are limited to the medical realm.
  • They say a con artist, after all, is not in the business of convincing skeptics, but rather, to let people believe what they already wish to. (okay, that is from the review, not the book itself — but is still a good line) True to modern book marketing, he has gone multimedia with a blog and podcast.

Now to get myself an actual copy of the book. I suspect there are a tonne of nuggets that apply to testing.