"What every leader needs to know about dignity and how to create a culture in which everyone thrives. This landmark book from an expert in dignity studies explores the essential but under-recognized role of dignity as part of good leadership. Extending the reach of her award-winning book Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict, Donna Hicks now contributes a specific, practical guide to achieving a culture of dignity. Most people know very little about dignity, the author has found, and when leaders fail to respect the dignity of others, conflict and distrust ensue. She highlights three components of leading with dignity: what one must know in order to honor dignity and avoid violating it; what one must do to lead with dignity; and how one can create a culture of dignity in any organization, whether corporate, religious, governmental, healthcare, or beyond. Brimming with key research findings, real-life case studies, and workable recommendations, this book fills an important gap in our understanding of how best to be together in a conflict-ridden world."--

New, 21st anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science and Bad Pharma, and an afterword by James Ball, covering developments in our understanding of irrationality over the last two decades. Why do doctors, army generals, high-ranking government officials and other people in positions of power make bad decisions that cause harm to others? Why do prizes serve no useful function? Why are punishments so ineffective? Why is interviewing such an unsatisfactory method of selection? Irrationality is a challenging and thought-provoking book that draws on statistica.

We talk about irrationality when behaviour defies explanation or prediction, when decisions are driven by emotions or instinct rather than by reflection, when reasoning fails to conform to basic principles of logic and probability, and when beliefs lack coherence or empirical support. Depending on the context, agents exhibiting irrational behaviour may be described as foolish, ignorant, unwise or even insane. In this clear and engaging introduction to current debates on irrationality, Lisa Bortolotti presents the many facets of the concept and offers an original account of the importance of judgements of irrationality as value judgements. The book examines the standards against which we measure human behaviour, and reviews the often serious implications of judgements of irrationality for ethics and policy. Bortolotti argues that we should adopt a more critical stance towards accepted standards of rationality in the light of the often surprising outcomes of philosophical inquiry and cognitive science research into decision making. Irrationality is an accessible guide to the concept and will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the limitations of human cognition and human agency.

Intelligent, lively, humorous, and thoroughly engaging, "The Predictably Irrational" explains why people often make bad decisions and what can be done about it.

Although much human action serves as proof that irrational behavior is remarkably common, certain forms of irrationality--most notably, incontinent action and self-deception--pose such difficult theoretical problems that philosophers have rejected them as logically or psychologically impossible. Here, Mele shows that, and how, incontinent action and self-deception are indeed possible. Drawing upon recent experimental work in the psychology of action and inference, he advances naturalized explanations of akratic action and self-deception while resolving the paradoxes around which the philosophical literature revolves. In addition, he defends an account of self-control, argues that "strict" akratic action is an insurmountable obstacle for traditional belief-desire models of action-explanation, and explains how a considerably modified model accommodates action of this sort.

Robyn Dawes defines irrationality as adhering to beliefs that are inherently self-contradictory, not just incorrect, self-defeating, or the basis of poor decisions. Such beliefs are unfortunately common. This book demonstrates how such irrationality results from ignoring obvious comparisons, while instead falling into associational and story-based thinking. Strong emotion—or even insanity—is one reason for making automatic associations without comparison, but as the author demonstrates, a lot of everyday judgment, unsupported professional claims, and even social policy is based on the same kind of "everyday" irrationality.

A look at the American health care system through analysis of consumer and provider behavior. The health care industry in the US is peculiar. We spend close to 18% of our GDP on health care, yet other countries get better results—and we don’t know why. To date, we still lack widely accepted answers to simple questions, such as “Would requiring everyone to buy health insurance make us better off?” Drawing on behavioral economics as an alternative to the standard tools of health economics, author Douglas E. Hough seeks to diagnose the ills of health care today more clearly. A behavioral perspective makes sense of key contradictions—from the seemingly irrational choices that we sometimes make as patients, to the incongruous behavior of physicians, to the morass of the long-lived debate surrounding reform. With the new health care law in effect, it is more important than ever that consumers, health care industry leaders, and the policymakers who are governing change reckon with the power and sources of our behavior when it comes to health. Praise for Irrationality in Health Care “Hough does an extraordinary job of distilling the literature and providing key insights to help us understand how health care consumers and providers really behave, and how government can formulate better policy. A must-read for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics and age-old questions in health care.” —Thomas Rice, Distinguished Professor, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health “Hough explains and applies the emerging field of behavioral economics to patient and physician decision making, providing a rationale for seemingly irrational behavior, and its particular usefulness for designing health policies.” —Paul J. Feldstein, University of California, Irvine “Balancing rigor and policy relevance, Hough shows the application of behavioral economics to health policy in a most compelling way. I liked this book so much, I wish I had written it!” —Richard Scheffler, University of California, Berkeley