Currently I am working on a graphic novel with the lab illustrator, Matt Trower. We are playing with titles and trying to decide what will be the best fit. If you’re willing to help us choose our favorite title, please follow the this link to weigh in.

Thank you!

Dear friends,

There’s no question that we are becoming more and more dependent on our phones as a society. It’s less clear to me, however, what exactly we are doing on our smartphones, and how much time we are spending on each of these activities. If you would like to participate in a brief study, please answer a few questions about your app usage.

Take the survey.

Or copy and paste this link into your browser: https://duke.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_7Ny8PvEN8J15E8d

Thanks very much,
Dan

First, I want to thank everyone who participated in this research.  Thanks

And now, for the results….

Email has become a mix of blessing and evil in our lives. Blessing because it has become a broad communication channel for everything—for our friends, family, work and businesses. Evil because it constantly interrupts us in our daily lives. Moreover, we end up at the mercy of other people’s timelines. It’s your list on your computer, but the order of that list and when it comes depends on when somebody else decides to send you something.

What if we could put emails on our own timeline? What if we could decide which and what kinds of emails we should receive at times that match our own schedules?

To find out, we asked over 1500 of your fellow readers to determine the ideal email timeline.

Currently, people receive 100% of emails immediately upon arrival with distracting notifications. So we asked people what percentage of their emails they wanted to see that quickly. It turns out only 11% of emails need to be shown immediately upon arrival with a notification to interrupt you.

What about the other 89% of emails? We took it a step further and asked when people needed to see the rest of their emails at various points in time: from increments of hours, the end of the day, week and month. In addition we asked what percentage of emails they would want automatically deleted and automatically archived.

We found that 31% of emails can handle a delay of 1 to 8 hours and importantly, without notifications. People need to see an additional 20% of emails by the end of the day, 11% by the end of the week and 3% by the end of the month. The remaining 24% of emails could simply be trashed or archived. 

With these email preferences in mind, imagine there was a magic email genie that would automatically categorize your messages into these various time categories. Which categories would be the most useful for everyone?

When we asked our participants, the top 4 categories people would want were emails to be divided by being send immediately (with notifications), by the end of the day, by the end of the week and — you guessed it — automatically deleted.

Right now the default of every major email service is to send notifications for emails immediately upon arrival. Roughly speaking, people only want to be interrupted for about 10% of their emails immediately upon arrival. This means that email services are hurting peoples’ attention in a counter productive way the remaining 90% of the time. How do we solve this conundrum? How can we get all the emails that people never want to see—out? Our results show that having a classification of different time frames and durations of when people need to deal with emails seem to be a useful idea. Instead of having one inbox that puts us at the mercy of other people’s timelines, maybe we need multiple inboxes that are sensitive to when something needs to be dealt with.

Was my previous post about Trump supporters having small penises an April Fool’s joke?

Partially.

While we did, in fact, conduct the research, and the results are true, the data isn’t about the relationship between real size and skills. It’s about what people think about this relationships. For example, this means that Donald Trump supporters don’t necessarily have small penises (they might, we never checked), it’s just that people think they do.

The same logic applies to the rest of the findings I described in the blog post (http://danariely.com/2016/03/31/trump-supporters-linked-with-having-small-penises/).

Yet, it is interesting what people think that penis size is so linked to so many attributes such as confidence, ability in math etc.

Irrationally yours

Dan

Dear readers, while the World Bank tackles many problems from many directions, basic failings of human relationships is not in fact currently among them.

Have a great April 2nd!

There is no question that email is one of the most important communication tools. It is also clear that it is a monster that is taking over our life and attention.

A few years ago in an attempt to reduce my own communication overload, we created Shortwhale (www.shortwhale.com), which asks the sender to classify the email before it reaches my inbox. Now, I am attempting to reduce email load and increase productivity further. Together with a fantastic team we created an email app (iPhone only at this point) that is aimed at helping people better manage their email-life and the related stress.

So far I have used an early version of the app for a few months and I find it very useful. We are now ready to open this app for a few more beta testers who are interested in helping us figure out ways to fight the email challenge.

Below is a short video of the email problem and our approach, as well as a way to sign up to test the app (link: http://newemailapp.com/).

If you are struggling with email and want to help us, please sign up – and thanks in advance .

Dan

And here is a talk I have posted before.  Some lessons about romance and love.  Some might even be useful.

Lots of love

Dan

Did you make a New Year’s Resolution to get fit in 2016?

I want to help you keep it – I’ve partnered with the podcast Only Human on an exciting new project called Stick to It! My colleagues at the Duke Center for Advanced Hindsight and I have designed a study running through the end of February that uses your smartphone to implement different approaches to get you exercising more and hopefully enjoy it. To sign up for the study, click here.

This guy has been posting “social science experiments” like this one:

Sadly, these are not real experiments.  They have been hiring actors and filming their reactions as if they were real.  How sad.  See this interview.

Lying about dishonesty….

https://goo.gl/fkKyNj
Our Kickstarter campaign ends very soon.

This might be your last chance to get the game:) 

And if you participated already, thanks, and we are looking forward to the next steps.

Dan