Dan Ariely provides thought provoking insight about the way we make decisions in his TED talk "Are we in control of our decisions". He argues that we are not in as much control of our actions as we think, for example optical illusions. An optical illusion is nothing more than a regular picture, only one where our brain can't make sense of what it's seeing. That's very troubling because we have evolved to have very precise and adequate visual processing, but even less so logic. And that's exactly what you can see in certain studies done by colleges, for example when given advertising prices. when given 3 options, 1:paper advertising 100$, 2:Online advertising 150$, 3:paper and online advertising 150$, people chose the third option by far the most because it's the "best deal". Now when they took away option 2 the distribution became much more even between option 1 and 3. This shows that we don't necessarily choose everything through rational thinking, and sometimes by just changing how information is presented to us changes our choices. This is significant because we think we are very in control of our decision making, when in fact we are easily manipulated by subtle details. This is related to tragedy, in that people often think that they have a choice in how everything happens, or they believe their choices will directly change every outcome accurately to how they imagine. When in fact some of these choices aren't entirely their own, for example Oedipus thought he made the choice to not kill his dad and not marry his mom, but that didn't workout to well did it. And the same goes for Kreon, He thought he chose to uphold his rules and everything would end up fine, that was his choice, but he ended up causing a very similar situation to occur, ending in his son and his son's fiance dead.
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Logan Smith
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