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.

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Dear Dan,

I find myself acting irrationally when it comes to squirrels. The rascals climb down a branch and onto my bird feeder, where they hang and eat like limber little pigs. Then I rush outside yelling and take great pleasure in frightening them away. But victory never lasts long. They come right back, and the whole insane cycle starts over. My sister tells me I need to watch “Snow White” again, to be reminded that squirrels are also a part of nature and not inherently worse than the birds I prefer. Perhaps, but this theory doesn’t satisfy me. Can you help to explain what’s going on with my reasoning, and how I might make peace with the furry marauders in my yard?

—Nearly Elmer Fudd

It sounds to me that the root of your problem is that you view the squirrels’ behavior as an immoral theft from the right owners of this food, the birds. If so, why don’t you start calling the contraption a “squirrel and bird feeder”? With this new framing, your problems should go away, and you might even be able to market this new product.

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Dear Dan,

Do you think that colleges should continue teaching subjects like philosophy, sociology and literature? After all, they’re a waste of time and money.

—Clara

With something like computer science or statistics, we find it easy to assess what skills we will acquire and how we will use them in a practical way. But with sociology, literature or even psychology, it is not always exactly clear how our studies are going to change us. Are we going to learn how to think analytically or see things differently? And how valuable are these skills anyway?

Maybe it is worthwhile to think about education as a lottery ticket. After all, like a lottery, when it comes to academic education we don’t know exactly what we’re going to get, and we’re not 100% certain that our degree will always justify our investment. But what if for every year of studying you got one really good idea? Or if your education somehow improved your mental capacity by 10%? Think of your education as a lottery ticket that you get to use year after year for the rest of your life. Of course, it is hard to predict what exact benefits you’ll reap from good ideas or an improved mental ability, but if you think about education as a long-term bet, I suspect that you will easily see it as a bet with very high expected payoffs.

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that as someone who teaches for a living, I have a vested interest in students continuing to attend universities. And maybe, in this case, it is hard for me to see the world from a different perspective.

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Dear Dan,

I was talking with a friend about your research on dishonesty, notably the way that people feel free to steal sodas and cookies from the “break room” but not cash. My friend said that office items such as staplers, tape dispensers and so on used to be constantly taken from his desk. He then glued a quarter onto each piece, and no one has taken anything with a coin on it for five years. Does this follow your findings?

—Tony

I love the application of this finding. Now, if we could only glue quarters to stock certificates and other financial products, maybe the world would be a better place.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

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.

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Dear Dan,

Some neighbors in our building are trying to get other neighbors to kindly put their garbage in the trash bins and not just leave it on the floor, but to no avail. Polite requests and threats have proven equally unsuccessful. What should we do?

—Ariel

The problem in your building is not just about cleanliness. The problem is more complicated, and has to do with changing a social norm. What you have is a sub-culture where trash bags are left on the floor instead of thrown in the bins. Since this is the established norm, it won’t be easily changed.

Social norms are a powerful motivator, and we are influenced by them all the time. If you go to the trash room and see bags lying around, you are affected to some extent by your own values, and to some extent by the behavior of those around you. You say to yourself, “leaving the garbage bags on the floor is the standard practice and I can do the same and still feel alright with myself”. But if there is no trash around, you would probably tell yourself, “That’s inappropriate, and I shouldn’t mess the place up”. The important thing to remember about social norms is that when it comes to minor violations we criticize the violators, but when the violations become repeated, the norm itself changes and sweeps everyone with it.

And the solution? Given that the New Year just started, and with it comes a symbolic opportunity for change, I would summon a tenants’ meeting to discuss plans for the New Year. In the meeting you need to create a new social understanding of the right behavior by having everyone sign a pledge to take care of the house, including placing your garbage in the right place. As long as you can create such a new social norm, the garbage will seem to clean itself.

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Dear Dan,

I often get the feeling that I am forgetting something and spend too much time trying to remember what it was—sometimes failing entirely, sometimes realizing that it wasn’t very important in the first place. How can I force myself to let minor things go more easily while still making sure I remember the important ones?

—Richard

With the increase in life expectancy, most of us have good chances to suffer some sort of memory loss. This means that dealing with reduced memory is part of the modern human condition. You’re just ahead of your time.

As for what you can do about it: The simple answer is to get a smartphone with a note-taking app and use it as your central memory repository. All your potential tasks will be there waiting for you, and all you’ll have to do is to go over the list. Such recognition is much less demanding than remembering.

The more difficult but deeper answer is that you should just stop worrying so much. You probably already realize that most things aren’t that important to begin with. If you could only get into this “Hakuna matata” mindset, you would be less stressed and much happier. Plus, remember that if something is really important, it is also important to someone else, and that someone will probably remind you about it at least three more times—so why take this pleasure away from them?

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See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

The Center for Advanced Hindsight has a hydroponic vegetable garden. This has never been explained to me, other than the fact that our lab just tends to have strange things and, to be honest, it’s not necessarily out of place given our lab coats, hanging basket chairs, and the DVD collection of Nina Hartley’s Guide of instructional erotic videos that appeared one day on my desk.

When I joined the lab, I saw that the plants were overgrown, underfed, and hadn’t grown any flower buds, let alone vegetables. After some office space opened up and our desks were rearranged, I ended up at the desk closest to the tomatoes and peppers, and de facto put in charge of keeping them alive. From then on I spent 15 minutes here and there watering the plants, adding nutrients, and heavily pruning.

Earlier this week, the first cherry tomato—a yellow one—popped off the plant, and I tried it. We were all so excited that we filmed the occasion. (Watch it here!)

It was a fun little experience (and a decent tomato). Though it didn’t taste very special, given what we know about the IKEA effect, it almost definitely tasted better than it would have had I bought it from the store. Like I said in the video, “It tastes like gardening.”

~Vlad Chituc~

Read more about the IKEA effect:

Norton, Michael I., Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely. “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22, no. 3 (July 2012): 453–460.

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.

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Dear Dan,

My neighborhood recently suffered a horrible tragedy: A house fire, started by a faulty appliance, broke out in the middle of the night and killed two young children. I don’t know the parents, but their family has many parallels with mine: the parents’ jobs, the kids’ ages, the friends we have in common and, most importantly, the fact that we also don’t have smoke alarms in our house. I haven’t bought one for the usual list of reasons: I’m so busy, no one said I have to get one, I don’t know what kind to get, I never see them in shops anyway and so on. So how can I get myself—and everyone I’ve ever met—to buy a smoke detector?

—Tanya 

It would be nice to think that everyone will realize the important steps they need to take for basic safety and just take them. But it’s also extremely unlikely. For example, we already know that texting and driving is terribly dangerous and that overeating is bad for us, but we still let our eyes drift to our phones when we’re in traffic and we still order that burger with fries.

I also suspect that something as seemingly simple as installing a smoke detector is more difficult and confusing than we might think: There are many options, they need batteries, they may need to be installed in a tricky spot, we are not sure which brand will fit the bracket we have at home, and so on. And while none of these concerns are particularly substantial, they do increase our procrastination and indecision—leaving us in homes without functioning smoke alarms.

This is why I think that cases such as this call for some type of government regulation— something that will not assume that we’ll act in our best long-term interest and instead will make us do the right thing.

In the meantime, I suspect that many people reading this right now are realizing that they need to get smoke alarms of their own or change the batteries—and I also suspect that this feeling will last about 20 minutes and then be replaced by other urgent thoughts. So if you (yes, you) are one of these people, stop now (yes, now), go online, order that smoke detector, get those batteries and tell your household that you promise to install it by the end of the week.

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Dear Dan,

I recently attended a lecture by a well-known academic, and I was amazed and baffled by his inability to communicate even the most basic concepts in his field of expertise. How can experts be so bad at explaining ideas to others? Is this a requirement of academia?

—Rachel 

Here’s a game I sometimes play with my students: I ask them to think about a song, not to tell anyone what it is and tap its beat on a table. Next I ask them to predict how many other students in the room will correctly guess the song’s name. They usually think that about half will get it. Then I ask the rest of the students for their predictions—and no one ever gets it right.

The point is that when we know something and know it well, it is hard for us to appreciate what other people understand. This problem is sometimes called “the curse of knowledge.” We all suffer from this affliction, but it’s particularly severe for my fellow academics. We study things until they seem entirely natural to us and then assume that everyone else easily understands them too. So maybe the type of clumsiness you heard is indeed something of a professional requirement.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

The end of the year is a time to reflect and think—where have we been, who do we want to be, and what do we want to do differently next year? But what if all of the resolutions we’ve been making are missing an important detail? What if all these “New Year’s resolution” articles going viral online right now are all deeply flawed? Might this help explain why almost everyone fails to keep their New Year’s resolutions?

Let’s imagine two would-be-resolvers: Riss (“the resistor”) and Remmy (“the remover”). Like so many Americans, both of them are trying to eat healthier and exercise more, but they approach these goals differently.

Riss follows all the traditional New Year’s resolution strategies out there. He buys healthy foods and workout DVDs. To ramp up his confidence, he reads inspirational quotes, creates a New Year’s playlist, and vows to succeed. He has what health scientists call “high self-efficacy” and the magical “Law of Attraction” readers of The Secret always talk about.

Most importantly, Riss is defined by the passionate goal to resist temptation—he wont be lazy, eat that cookie, or stay at home instead of go to the gym. With resolve like that, it seems like Riss is bound to succeed.

But let’s look at Remmy: what does she do? She really doesn’t make any changes except for two small things: she removes the junk food from her house and the HBO subscription she loves.

Remmy is defined by her goal to remove, rather than resist, temptation. When she comes home, she won’t have any choice but to eat the healthy food in her cabinets. If she wants to see her favorite HBO shows, she won’t have any choice but to use the TV at her gym.

When Riss comes home, though, he’ll have his health food and workout DVDs, but also junk food and tempting Adam Sandler movies. His confidence and resolve will help him resist these temptations for a while, but over time, as research by NYU Professor Andrea Bonezzi and colleagues shows, that resolve will likely fade. It won’t be long till Riss finds himself covered in cookie crumbs watching The Waterboy and shedding a tear every time a character shouts “You can do it!”

Resisting temptation almost always fails, because people are bad at predicting how their future selves will act. We continually fail to realize that the tired, miserable, and aroused versions of ourselves might not make the same choices that our well-rested, happy, and focused selves would make. Over time and after many grueling workweeks, the hopeful people who made New Year’s resolutions after a winter vacation will be replaced by people who just want a few slices of cake. This is why we have to focus on controlling, rather than resisting, temptation.

If we’re smart about temptation, we can even use it to our advantage. In the Remmy example, she does this by making the gym the only place for her to watch her guilty HBO pleasures. Wharton Business School Professor Katy Milkman and colleagues found that stocking gyms with addictive guilty pleasures (like an audio copy of The Hunger Games on gym iPods) lead people to go to the gym more. These gym goers couldn’t resist the temptation to come again and again to consume their guilty media pleasures—all while exercising.

Keeping New Year’s resolutions is like playing chess with our future selves—we have to realistically anticipate what moves they will make come February.

Advice givers and columnists tend to choose to just fill readers with hope, the promise of new products, confidence, and a “you can do it” spirit. Of course it’s important to be confident in any goal pursuit and work to develop the self-control muscle, but resolve alone rarely leads to a successful resolution.

So rather than face a losing battle, we can remove temptation and create a battlefield where we can give ourselves a true fighting chance to keep our New Year’s resolutions.

~Troy Campbell~

Read Dan’s advice for New Year’s resolutions here. 

A normal day in our life might look like this: The alarm clock buzzes. We hit snooze twice and steal another 16 minutes. As we get into the office, yesterday’s work crisis weighs heavily on our mind, but instead we log in and check Facebook for a while. After that, we dip in and out of meetings, chase our inbox, and start on a project that is due in 48 hours. And at 7:15, right before walking out the door, 25 minutes later than planned, we grab a sugar cookie from the communal jar to accompany us on the drive home.

A version of this routine is likely to be part of our grim reality most days, but there is one very important exception. On Jan. 1 many of us make all kinds of promises that “starting tomorrow, things are going to be different.” There is the old (2013 self) and the new (2014 self), and Jan. 1 is an opportunity to welcome the new, improved self in. As the New Year starts, we say to ourselves that the new, 2014 self will be different. We’re confident that from now on we won’t hit snooze, we’ll stop procrastinating and for sure we won’t mindlessly eat unhealthy snacks.

This kind of self-resolve is the kind of magic that keeps mankind moving. Unfortunately, come mid-January, the shiny “new self” doesn’t feel as new. After a few weeks of crashing against reality and old habit, the new self is bruised and sainted.

Given these challenges, how can we take advantage of our good intentions on Jan. 1 and make them work for us throughout the year, or at least for longer than they would naturally last?

One simple answer is to take advantage of these moments of clarity at the start of the New Year and take actions that would commit us to making good decisions in the future. Much like Ulysses and the sirens, this way, even if our future will tempt us to misbehave, we will not be able to act on our temptations.

Where in our modern life could the Ulysses-style “tying ourselves to the mast” help? Here are a few ideas that might help you make Jan. 1, 2014, different from Jan. 1 of years past:

1. Order an annual subscription to the Fruit Guy. By committing to a weekly service that delivers fresh fruit, we make having healthy food a reality. This approach has the added sweet side effect of urgency. Every week when the fruit is delivered, we know all too well that if we fail to consume the fruit in the next week, more of it will show up and we will have to waste the unused fruit. And if you like real adventures, what about a more extreme version of this? A weekly subscription to the Kale Guy?

2. Give a good friend the ability to take some money from your bank account if you break your diet. Tell this friend that if he sees you eating something unhealthy, he should withdraw a specified amount of money from your checking account and spend it. And if you find that this is not sufficiently painful, either make the amount larger, or make the deal with someone you don’t like that much (maybe your boss).

3. Set up an automatic monthly transfer from your checking account into a savings account. This quick, onetime decision to transfer money will help you spend within your budget, while also helping your future financial security.

4. Working out every day takes a lot of ongoing willpower. Joining a gym is nice but still requires the daily decision to go to the gym. Instead, a better approach is to set up recurring weekly “meetings” with friends or co-workers for workouts. This kind of social obligation is likely to hold you, and them, accountable to show up, and once you have shown up, you might as well start sweating.

5. Go to the nearby shelter and get a dog. Once you make this quick onetime decision, you are going to go for daily walks for the next decade.

Doing all of these things would make Jan. 1 a very busy day. But, by doing these things when the desire to start fresh is still strong in our mind, there is a much better chance that our good intentions will keep serving us for the better part of 2014.

By Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman, reposted from Time here.

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.

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Dear Dan,

During a recent trip to Los Angeles, I stopped by a coffee shop offering a very expensive coffee called kopi luwak, or civet coffee. I asked about the steep price, and the barista told me the story of the special process required to make this coffee: A catlike Indonesian animal known as a civet eats coffee cherries and then poops out what are basically beans. People then collect these “processed” beans and use them to make a highly unusual brew that’s said to be smoother than its journey. It can sell for hundreds of dollars per pound. I was curious but not interested (or brave) enough to buy it—let alone drink it. Can you explain why are people willing to pay for this?

—Chahriar

First, I think you made a mistake. You should have paid up and tried a cup—in part because you are still clearly curious about it, in part because it would have made a much better story (and what are a few dollars compared to a good story?). So next time you pass by a coffee place with kopi luwak, try it—maybe even get the double shot with hair and all the trimmings.

As for civet coffee’s quality: The promotional material that I found says that civets know how to pick the best coffee beans and that their digestive systems ferment the beans, reducing their acidity and providing a much better coffee. (I have no idea how this works, but the story caught my curiosity too.)

So why are people willing to pay for so much for civet coffee? It’s probably for the novelty and the story—and because the amount (and type) of labor involved is clearly so much higher than your average cup of java. People are generally willing to pay more for something that required more effort to produce even if the product itself is not better—and civet coffee sounds like a prime example of this effort-based-pricing principle.

Finally, I wonder how much people would be willing to pay had the beans passed through not an Indonesian animal but an American human. My guess: That’s too strong a brew for any of us.

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Dear Dan,

Are financial advisors a wise investment? Mine charges me 1% each year for all my assets under their management. Is it worth it?

—Allan

It is hard to know for sure. But the fact that many financial advisers have different hidden fees suggests to me that they themselves don’t think that people would pay if they charged for their services in a clear and upfront way.

To help you think about this question in your own life, let’s contrast two cases: In case one, you are charged 1% of your assets under management, and this amount is taken directly from your brokerage account once a month. In case two, you pay the same overall amount, but you send a monthly check to your financial adviser.

The second case more directly and clearly depicts the cost of your financial adviser, providing a better frame for your question. So, put yourself in the mindset of the second case, and ask yourself if you would pay directly for these services. If the answer is yes, keep your financial adviser; if the answer is no, you have your first action plan for the New Year.

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Dear Dan,

Every year, when Christmas comes, I feel an obligation to send Christmas cards to everyone I know, and every year, the number of cards I send gets larger and larger. It is now officially getting out of hand. Can I switch to sending cards only to my really close friends?

—Holly 

It is fine to send cards only to your good friends. I don’t think anyone left off the list will be offended, and you will also reduce their feeling of obligation to send you a card next year. And if you really want to eliminate the Christmas-card frenzy, there is always Judaism.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

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.

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Dear Dan,

Delta Air Lines recently announced plans to start distributing thousands of Microsoft Surface 2 tablets to its pilots to spare them lugging around heavy documents, maps and flight plans. As a passenger, I always suspected that flight attendants sometimes ask us to turn our gadgets off not because they might harm the plane’s instruments but because some airline employees get a kind of twisted satisfaction from making passengers suffer a bit more. What do you think? Is the whole issue of turning electronics off just a way to make the passengers realize that the flight attendants are really in control?

—Adam 

In fairness, the unpopular (and rapidly fading) ban on using personal electronics during takeoff and landing was a Federal Aviation Administration regulation, not a policy by the airlines. Even so, the logic of turning off iPads and Kindles while taxiing was never clear to me either, and the joy that some flight attendants took in commanding passengers to turn their devices off could make one suspect that your “control theory” is right. Nevertheless, I suspect that this was just one more regulation set up without much thought that the poor flight attendants were forced to follow—and that in fact, they most likely suffered much more from having to enforce a rule that annoyed passengers and lacked logic many times a day.

I do worry about another aspect of your question: making airplanes too reliant on tablet technology. A crash of the less dangerous type could translate into a more harmful one.

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Dear Dan,

I recently had a massage when I was very tired, and I fell asleep repeatedly. Every time I dozed off, the masseuse moved me particularly vigorously and woke me up. This left me a bit embarrassed, and it wasn’t fun to be woken up so many times in one hour. What should the masseuse have done—let me sleep through the massage, or woken me up to experience it?

—Merve 

The person giving you the massage was wrong. More generally, this is really a question about different types of pleasure and their building blocks. In general, you can think about the pleasures you get from anticipating a massage, experiencing it, and remembering it after the fact.

The interesting thing about remembered and anticipated pleasure is that they capture some aspects of the experience—but not all of them. That’s why, for example, you might remember an experience that was great for 15 minutes as better than an experience that was great for the first 15 minutes and then merely good for 15 more. In essence, the longer experience had more goodness in it (30 minutes), but the remembered pleasure wasn’t as large because it also involved some less exciting moments.

I suspect that the masseuse wanted you to have more moments in which you experienced the massage—but by doing so added some less pleasurable parts and decreased your remembered pleasure, which will also decrease the anticipatory pleasure you’re likely to feel before your next session on the table.

This lesson, by the way, applies to many other domains of life. Think about a presentation to clients, a dinner party, or a discussion with a friend—it’s the quality, not the quantity, which influences our remembered and anticipated pleasures.

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Dear Dan,

My kids are spending much of their time on social networks such as Facebook. Are they really being social with their friends or just wasting time?

—Dafna 

Here’s my test for real friendship: Would your friends bail you out of jail if you needed them to? My sense is that spending face-to-face time with friends is likely to increase the likelihood of bail, while following someone’s status updates won’t. If your kids aren’t increasing their odds of getting real help when they need it, they probably aren’t being social in a meaningful way.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

With the holiday season upon us, it’s a good time to reflect on the things we have that we truly need and the rest that is just superfluous. How greedy are you?

In line with this thought, our very own Dan Ariely and Aline Grüneisen published an article in the November/December Scientific American Mind on the price of greed.

For a juicy excerpt, read on:

Ferocious competition may occasionally lead to optimal market outcomes, but it can also have harmful side effects. Think about competition in sports. At first glance, the drive to be the best appears to propel human achievements to new heights. World records are surpassed, and yesterday’s Olympic medalists pale in comparison with today’s champions. Yet extreme dedication has costs. Athletes may not spend enough time with their friends and families, or they may sacrifice their long-term health to perform better in the short term — by overexerting their body or taking performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids.

The consequences of unchecked greed can also spill over into society. In his 2011 book The Darwin Economy, economist Robert H. Frank of Cornell University outlines some of the disastrous effects of allowing competition to run free. Take, for example, neighbors gunning for social status. Each tries to outdo the others, purchasing a slightly flashier car, bigger pool or more expensive grill. When Joe Jones down the block builds a home theater and Jane Smith across the street installs a 3-D amphitheater, you will no longer be satisfied with your meager widescreen television. We don’t simply try to keep up with the Joneses, we try to surpass them…

See the full article here (or buy a copy from your closest magazine retailer)!