We human beings should be famous for doing irrational things predictably. No, I am not joking.
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, wrote a book about it. The take home message from his TED talk is that the only way to stop making some those mistakes is to be able to challenge our intuitions. The inherent difficulty in doing so cannot be overstated but that is exactly why we make those mistakes time and again without realising.
Akshat Rathi 