Dan Ariely
Professor, Duke University · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
28statements → 6claims → 5claims resolved → 40%fully supported → 3.96/5average certainty → 1.89/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 4said about them ↓
2 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
6 assertions · 19 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Dan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Their most notable contradicted claim
Most people experience peak productivity during a two-hour morning window
“One of the things we know, again, is that people are productive in about the first two hours of the day. Almost everybody is productive for the 1:02 hours of the day. Not when you wake up, but kind of eight to 10, nine to 11. And then we, ah, ah, have a lull, …”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Dan Ariely on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Dan Ariely said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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…”
Shaper scale users lost weight while standard scale users gained it
“So we just finished a large study. Some people got the regular scale and those people gained a little bit of weight every month. And some people got our scale and they lost 0.7% of their body weight every month for five months. The people with the regular scal…”
Standard economics only works for perfectly rational agents
“And then because of that standard economics continues in having recommendation that are really good for people who are perfectly rational. Whereas behavioral economics makes recommendations that are good for normal people.”
Almost no company is willing to seriously address institutional dishonesty
“It's kind of interesting that when you talk about, you know, how to get people to save more, it's easier to get people to do something, how to get people to be healthier. But when you talk about honesty, almost no company is interested in taking like a real, r…”
Complex and deliberate actions require explicit rules rather than habits
“And you can't have a habit of running, right? You don't go running and then you say, oh, where am I? I have no idea. I was running. So, so for things that are deliberate and take actions, you need something more than a habit.”
Hire people you love first and determine their roles later
“So one of my rules is to only work with people I love. And when I meet people I really like, I usually just hire them and then I worry less about what to do with them. Like, you know, I don't, I usually don't have a project and I say I need somebody with skill…”
People never adapt to the misery of commuting, Kahneman's research shows
“One of the things that they show is commuting is a really miserable thing to do and people don't get used to it.”
Human decisions are primarily determined by the immediate environment
“One of the big lessons in social science is that we make decisions as the function of the environment that we're in. And if we're in one environment, we make one decision. If we're another one, we make a different decision.”
Credit cards and Apple Pay are designed to encourage mindless spending
“Credit cards and Apple Pay and Android Pay are designed to get us to spend more and think less.”
Most people experience peak productivity during a two-hour morning window
“One of the things we know, again, is that people are productive in about the first two hours of the day. Almost everybody is productive for the 1:02 hours of the day. Not when you wake up, but kind of eight to 10, nine to 11. And then we, ah, ah, have a lull, …”
Stepping on a morning scale serves as a daily health reminder
“We know it's a good thing to step on a scale every morning, not so good to step on it in the evening, and it's good to step on it in the morning, not because we weigh less than in the evening, but because in the morning when we step on it reminds us that we wa…”
People invent internal rationalizations to justify choices driven by defaults
“So, so what happened is that we are so quick in telling ourselves stories about why what we did was actually the right thing that we convince ourselves. We kind of hide this, not just not just from other people, but from ourselves, and we end up thinking that …”
People cheat just enough to still maintain a positive self-image
“The amount of dishonesty that we exhibit ends up being a balance between wanting to benefit from dishonesty But not wanting to feel that we're thieves or dishonest people. So we cheat up to the level that we would feel uncomfortable about it. So, so it's very …”
Maintaining honesty requires continuous daily vigilance, much like dieting
“Honesty is a little bit like dieting. It's not that something that you read once and then you get to fix it. It's something that you have to fight with every day, right?”
Strict binary rules prevent self-deception better than flexible limits
“So if you said, for example, I'm going to eat dessert on only one out of every four days, odds are that you would cheat yourself, that you will end up eating more dessert than you wanted. But if you had a rule that says, I never eat dessert, or I only eat dess…”
Human body weight naturally fluctuates three to four pounds per day
“Weight can fluctuate easily Three or four pounds a day. For people who are obese it can fluctuate up to 10 pounds a day.”
Adopting an external advisor's perspective reduces personal bias in decision-making
“One simple recommendation is to think about yourself as an advisor, not about your own interest. So what would you advise somebody like you to do? And when you advise somebody external, then you're not as influenced by your own biases, right? And you could do …”
Treating actions as repeated large decisions prevents ethical discounting
“By both thinking about it, not as a one time, but as a multiple time and not as a small decision by a large decision, you bringing into context that is more, more extensive and you're less likely to basically give yourself a discount and say, we're just doing …”
Pluralistic ignorance leads groups to misinterpret inaction as informed consensus
“Pluralistic ignorance is the idea that when we are in the company of other people and we look at the behavior of other people as indicating what the right thing to do is, and what other people are knowing, and therefore we interpret their own behavior in that …”
Students in large classes avoid asking questions assuming others understand
“When I teach a large class, the problem is that people don't ask questions. And, you know, you look at everybody else, and you say, nobody else is asking a question. It must be that other people understand this.”
Ariely reads nonsense to students to demonstrate pluralistic ignorance
“I start the class By taking a paragraph from some post-modern literature, a text generator, something, you know, crazy that you don't understand what's going on... And I just read this for five minutes, and, you know, and it's the first class, it's first class…”
The other half of the tape: Dan Ariely's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes on the Knowledge Project. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shane Parrish 1Matt Mullenweg 1Logan Ury 1Julia Galef 1
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2021 1 mention in 1 episode
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #33 Dan Ariely: The Truth About Lies | May 25, 2018 | 42m |