We can always count on Dan Ariely to help us view situations from a different perspective. Election day is no exception, and today the New York Times featured Dan’s study of how liberals and conservatives react to jokes. The results? People who describe themselves as conservative enjoyed all varieties of jokes more than liberals.

Here’s one of the jokes from the study:

Husband: When I get mad at you, you never fight back. How do you control your anger?
Wife: I clean the toilet bowl.
Husband: How does that help?

Wife: I use your toothbrush.

Visit Dan’s blog for more information about the research and a spirited debate about the findings.

Dan Ariely considers economists’ approach to mistakes today on predictablyirrational.com:

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them? When the Chicago economists sometimes (reluctantly) admit that people make mistakes, they claim that people make different types of mistakes that will eventually cancel each other out in the market. Behavioral economics argues that, instead, people will often make the same mistake, and the individual mistakes can aggregate in the market. Let’s take the subprime mortgage crisis, which I think is a great example (but a very sad reality) of the market working to make the aggregation of mistakes worse. It is not as if some people made one kind of mistake and others made another kind. It was the fact that so many people made the same mistakes, and the market for these mistakes is what got us to where we are now.

Here’s a nice Wall Street Journal video featuring Duke Professor Dan Ariely’s thoughts on irrationality and the current financial crisis.

*Full disclosure – sections of the video were actually pulled from another video we produced here at Fuqua.

Dan Ariely considers the mortgage business today on his Predictably Irrational blog:

Here is my perspective on the sub-prime mortgage crisis: When the housing market was hot, all the bankers that gave out loans assumed that their customers didn’t want their house to go into foreclosure, and that they would act accordingly. The first assumption was correct-no one wanted their house to go into foreclosure. But the second assumption, that consumers knew what to do in order to make sure they didn’t lose their house, was wrong, very wrong. The basic problem is that it is extremely difficult to calculate the optimal amount that any of us should borrow on a mortgage. Think about it: If you had to get a new house right now, what is the ideal amount to spend and how much of it should you take as a mortgage? Read more.

From Fuqua Professor Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational blog:

I would like to propose that one reason people oppose the government bailout is because they want revenge on the companies that helped lead us into this disaster. Even though they know they will lose money and it doesn’t help them at all, at a very basic level a part of them want to see the companies suffer. Read more.