Dan Ariely

This year, try thinking in advance about all the steps involved in putting up a light display: getting the boxes down from the attic, designing the display, stringing lights, setting up the power connection. Last week I had to miss a class with my favorite instructor and meant to download a recording of it later in the day, but somehow it just didn’t feel as urgent, and I never got around to it. It might seem odd, but in a sense it’s easier to schedule a live event at a fixed time than a recorded one you can view whenever you choose. This worked to your advantage, since people remembered the end of your talk better than the beginning.

For example, you could invite a small group of guests for an outdoor potluck on Thanksgiving, and say that if the weather is too cold or people are unwell, you’ll arrange a way to donate the food to the needy. We might end up not having the holiday we hoped for this year, but in general people can bounce back from a change in plans much more easily than we can deal with uncertainty about the future. So all things considered, running a 5K race sounds like one of the most positive ways you can respond to turning 60. We got appraisals of the house’s value from multiple real-estate agents, but they each gave different estimates and my siblings

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com. This is less exciting than an “English auction,” where participants bid against each other and the last person willing to raise their bid gets the item and pays for it. If the seller expects the potential bidders to differ greatly in how much they will pay for an item, it’s advantageous to use a sealed-bid auction, since it keeps high bidders from discovering that they could have won the item for less. When potential bidders don’t know how much an item is potentially worth, an English auction will usually bring the highest price, because it allows bidders to establish the item’s value by learning from one another’s bids.

It’s possible that when you were pricing the items for sale online, you unconsciously inflated the value of the things you owned, while you were more objective about the value of your mother-in-law To avoid the endowment effect, try asking someone to have a look at your items and suggest prices, the way that you did for your mother-in-law. So while you’re getting a lot done in the lab, make an extra effort to pay attention to parts of the work you might be neglecting, such as keeping good records and following safety protocols. Rituals differ between cultures, but they often involve the mourner altering their appearance in some way, by wearing a special item of clothing, only wearing certain colors or styling their hair differently.