Dan Ariely
Professor, Duke University. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Dan Ariely conducts behavioral science research on irrational decision-making and dishonesty, authoring bestselling books including Predictably Irrational. He founded Duke’s Center for Advanced Hindsight and co-founded companies such as Irrational Capital and BEworks.
2shows
3appearances
69statements
18resolved
13supported
1contradicted
72%fully supported
10said about them ↓ Everything Dan Ariely said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Ariely: Token female leadership appointments make female employees feel worse
“We found that some companies, when they assign women to high positions, The women within these companies feel worse. Why? Because they take it as an indication that the company doesn't really care about them, that they're only doing things to appeal to PR, lik…”
Ariely: Compensation fairness drives performance much more than absolute pay levels
“We found that overall level of compensation doesn't matter so much. Fairness, perception of fairness in compensation matters a lot.”
Ariely: Disparity in appreciation between management and rank-and-file hurts stock performance
“One of the things we find is that it's not about just the overall level of, let's say, feeling appreciated. So we find that feeling appreciated is a very good signal. But it's not just the overall level of being appreciated. It's the difference between how man…”
Ariely: The SHE Index systematically underperforms the S&P 500
“Yeah, so it does much worse. Systematically, repeatedly, by big gap.”
Ariely: Low gender sentiment gap delivers 5% annual alpha over S&P
“When we look at our data, and we ask the question of, what is the gap? We said a lot of things are about relativity. So we said, for each company, let's calculate the gap between how men feel and how women feel. Like, you know, do you feel appreciated? What's …”
Ariely: Treating employees well generates 6% annual alpha
“And we find, if you look at our results, we have, like, six percent a year of alpha of treating your employees well does better.”
Ariely: Increasing pain intensity worsens memory far more than extending duration
“I found out that if you have a period of pain, and you make it longer, you don't actually remember it as worse, but if you change the amplitude, the intensity, you can make it much worse, and the nurses were doing the wrong thing. They were trying to minimize …”
Ariely: Human capital factors almost universally outperform the S&P 500 in backtests
“It turns out that all of those strategies but one, all of these building blocks at one, beats the S&P on that time period, and the one that does worse is like tiny bit worse. Not all of them do as well as others. It's a You know, there's a range, but one from …”
Ariely: A $30 cash bonus cost Intel 5% to 6% in worker productivity
“In the money condition, it went up by about six percent on the first day, went down by 12% the next day. It actually backfired and went slightly up toward the control condition on the next two days, not catching up, though, to the control condition. And in gen…”
Ariely: Widening gap between leadership and employee sentiment signals shorting opportunity
“I will tell you that we find that in every company, when the gap between how Leadership feels about the company and how the rank and file employees feel about the company. As this gap grows, it's a good sign to short the stock.”
Ariely: Adding unstructured job interviews makes candidate hiring predictions worse
“Job interviews are notoriously terrible. You take somebody and you get their GPA, GRE, whatever, and then you add an interview, your prediction is worse. If it's a non-structured interview.”
Abstract dishonesty experiment found identical cheating rates across all countries
“Then Francesca Gino, my friend, said, ah, come to Italy. We'll show you what the Italians can do. The Italians cheated just the same. We tried Turkey. We tried South Africa, Kenya, Germany, Sweden. We tried Portugal. We tried the UK. We tried Canada because th…”
Culture dictates domain-specific dishonesty rather than fundamental individual corruption
“Culture matters, but it matters in silos. What happened is that deep down inside, just because you grew up in Kenya or in another corrupt country, it doesn't mean that you become corrupt as an individual. It just means that culture come and says there are some…”
Recruiters secretly prefer hiring candidates who will cheat for the company
“We gave MBAs resumes of potential job candidates. And in those resumes, those people were either told, said that they were, it was said about them that they were either dishonest in their personal lives, like to the significant other. They were dishonest at wo…”
Ariely: Uneven employee complaints signal worse performance than uniform dissatisfaction
“And if you find that people are complaining equally at management and at the level of the employee, this is not as a bad signal as if management is not complaining and employees are complaining much more.”
Ariely: ESG drives profitability primarily through employee motivation
“I think that the real pathway is For ESG, goes through employee motivation. If you think about it, the moment you are doing some version of ESG, presumably your employees are more on board. They feel that the company has better goals, the company is more conne…”
Ariely: HR should operate as an R&D function, not legal compliance
“HR in most company is a procedural process. Legal function. They do the sexual misconduct and the module. They worry about procedural things. I think that HR needs to be an R&D function. They need to continuously try different things and improve how the compan…”
Ariely: Activist investors trying to reform corporate culture misunderstand it
“And I think that a lot of investors, a lot of activist investor look at companies where they don't like the culture and they say, let me buy that company and influence the culture. But I don't think they systematically understand the culture.”
Ariely: High-appreciation firms gained 15% in early COVID versus 5% market average
“The companies in general, if I remember correctly, between March and October, the stock market lost a lot and then gained a lot, and it was about five percent net overall. The companies that I'll tell you now about went up by 15%. That's a big gap, and those c…”
Ariely: Employee health and financial benefits only boosted performance during COVID-19
“So before COVID, we found that employee benefits didn't make a big difference. Financial benefits, health benefits didn't matter. During COVID, there was actually a positive effect of these benefits, and I think it's because period when people are more worried…”
Ariely: JPMorgan found his human capital data uncorrelated with ESG
“And the team at JP Morgan did a really nice analysis of our data. They were unbelievably thorough. I was deeply impressed by these guys, and it came basically with very good analysis and result, and it's kind of nice to have somebody like a third It's a little…”
Ariely: A gender-focused index underperforms a pure human capital index
“The real index was designed to maximize return from the beginning with no other constraint. The gender index was taking the best we had, but limiting it to companies who do well on, on gender. So it does not as well. Maybe we have something like slightly more …”
Ariely: Physical tracking coin doubled savings in Kibera study over 20% match
“And it turns out that the coin almost doubled savings compared to everything else, including 20% match.”
Ariely: People under-save because modern savings and insurance are socially invisible
“Every time we save or buy insurance, we don't get any positive reinforcement. Not from ourselves and not from the people around us. So think about the time when people used to save in goats, right? If you saved in livestock, you could come home from the office…”
The other half of the tape: Dan Ariely's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 5 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Kristof Gleich 6Shane Parrish 1Matt Mullenweg 1Logan Ury 1Julia Galef 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 6
the Knowledge Project 4
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 6 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Professor, Duke University | 2 | 41 | 85% 11/13 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Professor, Duke University | 1 | 28 | 40% 2/5 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |