Dan Ariely

Sign up for A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior. It’s not only FREE and open to everyone, but will surely keep you amused for the next six weeks.

Sign up for A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior. It’s not only FREE and open to everyone, but will surely keep you amused for the next six weeks.

Sign up for A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior. It’s not only FREE and open to everyone, but will surely keep you amused for the next six weeks.

Today is the day that my free online class on coursera, A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior, opens to the public.

And in honor of this class, my three books will be available as an e-bundle at a discount ($19.99 for all three) until the day after the class starts, March 26th — but only until that date.

You can purchase the e-bundle through Kindle, Nook, iBookstore, Kobo, or Google.

And if you haven’t already signed up for A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior, it’s the perfect time to do it now! It’s not only FREE and open to everyone, but will surely keep you amused for the next six weeks.

Irrationally Yours,

Dan

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, just email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

My boyfriend and I have been together for a while, and people ask us whether we’re going to get married. We get along great and love each other very much, but I just don’t see the point of marriage. Why not just live together in a civil union and be happy the way things are? Aside from the cost, is there any point to this elaborate ritual? 

—Janet

I have no research on this topic, but allow me to share a story that might help you to think about the question.

When I was 19 and spending time in a hospital in Israel, recovering from severe burns, I had a friend there named David, who had been badly injured in the army while disassembling a land mine. He lost one of his hands and an eye and also had injuries to his legs and some scars. When Rachel, his girlfriend of several months, broke up with him, the other patients in the department were furious with her. How could she be so disloyal and shallow? Did their love mean nothing to her? Interestingly, David was better able to see her side, and he was not as negative as the rest of us about her decision.

Think about Rachel in the story above. Does her behavior upset you? How might your feelings differ if it had been a longer-term relationship, if they were engaged or in a civil union, or if they were married? And how would you behave if you were in Rachel’s position in each of these relationships?

I suspect that your level of scorn for Rachel will depend to a large degree on the type of relationship she had with David. I also suspect that your predictions about your own decision to stick with a partner who just experienced an awful injury would similarly depend on the type of relationship. If your assessment changes when you stipulate that David and Rachel were married, this suggests that publicly saying “for better and for worse” really means something to you.

Obviously, marriage is not some magical superglue for relationships; the high divorce rate is no secret. But marriage can serve a very real purpose by bolstering commitment and feeling in long-term relationships, all of which inevitably hit rough patches. So while I wouldn’t advocate marriage in all situations, I do think it’s worth thinking about the ways in which it can strengthen the bond between people.

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Dear Dan,

When I go to a public bathroom, I often think about which stall I should use. Any advice?

—Cathy

I assume that your practical aim is to figure out which bathroom stall is likely to have been used the least. But what you are really asking is what drives other peoples’ choices in this important domain.

If those who patronize public bathrooms usually choose a stall based on which toilet they think is used the least, they will all choose the one they think is used least—which as a result, ironically, would be that most of them would use the same toilet. Therefore, you would be advised to pick the opposite (i.e., the stall that people think gets the most traffic). Following this logic, if people expect the stall farthest from the entrance to be the most popular, they will avoid using it—leaving it relatively more clean and unused than the others.

But what happens if people are more sophisticated than that? What if they come to the restroom with this same understanding and as a consequence pick what they think is the opposite of what other people think, or the opposite of the opposite?

All of this boils down to a more essential question: How sophisticated do you think other people are?

Personally, I believe people generally take about one step in their logical thinking. So I would say: Choose the opposite of the opposite and select the stall that people think will be used the most.

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Dear Dan,

I enjoy Twitter, but I find that some people tweet very frequently, sometime as often as a dozen times an hour. When their face shows up again and again, I begin ignoring their messages. By contrast, when people tweet just once a day, I’m more likely to pay attention to what they say. Is this just me or does it reflect a larger principle?

—Heidi

I suspect that this feeling is very common. I also imagine that very few people have dozens of interesting things to say a day, much less an hour. Perhaps Twitter is a place where a system based on limits and scarcity (maybe two tweets a day) would be better for everyone.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

I recently came across this video that some talented person made of a study I conducted on wealth inequality a few years back with Mike Norton. It does a great job covering the main findings regarding the differences between what Americans think the distribution of wealth is (somewhat even), what they would prefer (more even than socialist Sweden), and how wealth is actually distributed (the bottom 40% of Americans possessing less than 0.3% of total wealth, the top 20% possessing 84%). The graphs, and a longer explanation, are also available here.

The only thing I wish he emphasized a little more is how similar the results were for Democrats and Republicans, which I found very hopeful. Even with all the ideological polarization in Washington, the moment we ask the question of ideal wealth distribution in a general and less self-interested way, we seem to be a country that cares a lot about each other.

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, just email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

I was recently approached by a panhandler who asked me for 75 cents, and I gave him the money. I was late for my train, so I didn’t have time to stop and try to understand why he chose 75 cents. But I wonder: Do you think the 75-cent request could be a “market tested” amount, one that yields a higher overall level of “donations” than asking outright for a buck or more.

—Brad

The panhandler could be trying to make a unique request in order to separate himself from the competition. But my guess is that you were more willing to give him money because you inferred things from the specificity of his request.

When someone tells us to meet them at 8:03, we come to a different conclusion about how seriously they mean that exact time as compared with their telling us to meet them at 8 or 8-ish. In the same way, a request for exactly 75 cents may carry a set of inferences about how seriously the person needs the money. It may lead us to think there is a specific reason for the request, like getting enough for bus fare. Plus, even if he asks for 75 cents, it’s likely that people will give $1 and not wait for change.

You could argue that the same principle would apply if he asked for $1.25, but in this case the size of the request might deter some people, and if they don’t have exact change, giving $2 might be too much. This is just speculation, though. If you are willing to volunteer as an experimenter for a few days, we can gather some real data and get to the bottom of this.

What lessons can we draw from this strategy? First, think about the inferences that people make from the exact way that we request something. Second, asking for general help is unlikely to be as effective as asking for exactly what we need.

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Dear Dan,

In a restaurant where waiters pool their tips, could they actually receive more tips overall by employing a “good waiter/bad waiter” routine, where one waiter is surly and unhelpful, then another waiter steps in who is friendly and goes above and beyond in serving the client? I suspect that the scheme might cause the customer to leave a larger tip for the second waiter, which will ultimately be pooled with the tips of the “bad” waiter.

—David

I agree with your analysis. And for it to work, you don’t even need the waiters to share their tips—they could just alternate roles.

A friend who worked for a large consumer-products company was trying to change the company’s service motto from “we do things right for our customers” to “we mess up the first time, but then we fix it.” His idea (which upper management rejected, by they way) was that when people expect and receive good customer service, it draws no attention, and they just take it for granted (you can think of parallels to romantic relationships as well). But if we give customers a contrast between good and bad service (as at a restaurant), they may start to notice and appreciate good service more.

I suspect that some industries may have already picked up on this idea, and that airport restaurants are leading the charge by providing the training grounds for delivering bad service most effectively.

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Dear Dan,

I graduated from college a few years ago, and since then my social life has been limited to Facebook. And it is far from satisfying.

—James

Facebook has many wonderful aspects, but I agree that it is no substitute for human contact. If you ever feel that nobody really cares whether you’re alive, try missing a couple of student loan payments.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Soon you’ll be able to have me in your pocket wherever you go…

Recently I had the opportunity to interview actor Peter Dinklage (of Game of Thrones fame) as part of the Rubin Museum Brainwave series, which pairs big names from pop culture with cognitive researchers to see what comes of it. My intention was to see if I could draw some connections between the craft of acting and the field of social science. (As it turned out, I was fairly unsuccessfully. For now.)

I asked Mr. Dinklage several questions to this effect, which he answered in more or less the same way: “No.”

First, I asked whether the fact that he plays such a conspiratorial, dishonest (albeit relatively heroic) character has any impact on his daily life. “No,” he said, nicely. He explained that he finds it easier to play characters who are very different from himself.

Next I asked if he felt people related to him differently, again, given that his character was remarkably crafty and deceptive. Again, “no.” He gave people credit for being smart enough to differentiate between the person on screen and the one before them.

Finally, I explained an experiment I conducted long ago on people’s experience tasting beer. In this experiment, we had people sample a few beers, one, called the MIT brew, had balsamic vinegar in it. The people who had no knowledge of the vinegar actually liked the beer better; those who knew about the addition hated it. Basically, their preconceptions overwhelmed their experience and made it much worse.

There were two issues at play here: first, that beer is hard to evaluate in general, as there’s no clear scale for judging it. We can say we like or dislike it, sure, and we may even talk about its smooth or hoppy character, but those are simply aspects of the beer without definitive value. Second, expectation changes our experience of things. When there is difficulty in the evaluation of something, expectations can alter experience even more.

To this end, I asked him if he felt acting was ever like wine or beer—something difficult to judge objectively in the face of preconceptions. I explained that before I’d had a chance to watch the show (research!), I had been told that he was the best actor in the series. So, did he think my experience of the show might have been shaped by my expectations? One last “no,” and he went on to explain that acting could certainly be evaluated. At the same time he admitted that there were well-known and well-regarded actors who he thought were terrible (he didn’t provide names). I thought this made my point, but I didn’t say so.

So are there any lessons for acting in social science? I would say there are, but that perhaps actors themselves are too close to their work to appreciate the irrationality in it, and how the majority of people experience entertainment.

5 years ago today Predictably Irrational was published.

It has been an amazing five years — and I just wanted to say thanks to those of you who read and reacted to this research.

Irrationally yours

Dan

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p.s This was my blog post from 5 years ago:

I am delighted to announce the birth of Predictably Irrational.

Predictably Irrational was born after a rather long but mostly painless labor, and so far seems healthy and in good spirit. Predictably Irrational is largely orange and blue, but they tell me that this is normal (or at least acceptable).

At birth it is about 300 pages, and 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches.

They tell me that the next few weeks will be a lot of work around the clock, and sleepless nights. But as the proud father, I am looking forward to this next step.

Dan