Why Iranian handlers pay their spies so little — and what it teaches us about how we all negotiate with our own conscience

A friend recently shared with me a quote from the Times of Israel’s daily podcast, on an episode about Israelis who spy for Iran. It’s the kind of quote that anyone should read twice:

“…if the Iranian handlers offered lots of money, then the soldiers or the civilians or whoever it is involved would feel like they are actually carrying out treason if it’s in exchange for lots of money. But when it’s a small amount of money? They feel less bad about it.”

Stop and notice how strange this sounds. Standard economics says that if you want someone to do something costly and risky — and betraying your country is about as costly and risky as it gets — you should pay them more. Bigger incentive, more takers. And yet here are the handlers, professionals in the business of getting people to cross lines, deliberately paying less. Not because they’re cheap. Because small payments work better.They have, in effect, rediscovered something we found in the lab almost twenty years ago.

In our research on dishonesty, Nina Mazar, On Amir and I gave people a simple math task and paid them per correct answer, with an easy opportunity to cheat. The standard economic prediction is that people would cheat as much as they could get away with. That’s not what happened. People cheated — but just a little. A few questions here and there, well below what they could have safely claimed. We called the force behind this the “fudge factor”: the idea is that we want the benefits of cheating, but we also want to keep seeing ourselves as good, honest people, and we resolve this tension by cheating exactly up to the point where our self-image starts to complain. Small transgressions slip through our moral accounting unrecorded. Big ones get flagged.

And here is the detail that connects directly to the Iranian spies: in our experiments, raising the payoff for cheating did not increase cheating. If anything, when the amounts got large, people cheated less. Taking ten dollars you didn’t earn makes you “someone who rounded up.” Taking a hundred makes you a thief — and that label is precisely what the fudge factor cannot digest.

The Iranian handlers understand this accounting perfectly. I don’t think they have read our research or my book, but I think they have learned the same lesson from their own experience over time. The payment isn’t really compensation; it’s a categorization device. Nobody can accept a million dollars to photograph a secret military installation and still tell themselves a story in which they’re not a spy. The money itself would scream the truth. But a few hundred dollars to take a picture of a street corner? That’s not treason, that’s a gig. “It’s just to cover expenses.” The small price tag keeps the act filed in the mental drawer of small favors, right next to inflating an expense report — and that is the drawer our conscience never audits.

But this is just the first act of the journey down the slippery slope of doing things we wouldn’t have imagined we would do. There’s a second act to this playbook. Once someone has taken the small payment and done the small task, they’re no longer a person who would never work for Iran — that line is already behind them. The next request can be slightly bigger, and refusing it now means admitting that the previous one was wrong too. One small, cheaply-priced step at a time, people walk into places they would never have agreed to jump to.

I don’t expect many of my readers to be approached by foreign handlers. But all of us run the same accounting system, and all of us are surrounded by people who price things to keep them feeling small — and by our own inner handler doing exactly the same (“it’s just one invoice,” “everyone rounds up a little”). The espionage cases are just the extreme edge of a very ordinary machinery: the really dangerous transgressions rarely arrive looking big. They arrive priced small, precisely so our conscience will wave them through.

So here is the lesson, and it’s one worth teaching our kids and our organizations: when you’re deciding whether something is right, judge the act, not the price tag. And if someone ever offers you suspiciously little money for something that feels a bit off — understand that the smallness of the offer is not reassuring. It is the most alarming thing about it.

Source: The Times of Israel Daily Briefing, “As both sides keep striking, is there still a Lebanon ceasefire?”, April 26, 2026.

Mazar, N., Amir, O., & Ariely, D. (2008). The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self-concept maintenance. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(6), 633–644.

Ariely, D. (2012). The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves. New York: Harper.

We picture a change in beliefs in other people as a switch. Someone was fine, and then one day they were not, and somewhere in between there was a video with some misinformation. It is a comforting picture, because it implies a fix. Find the bad video, replace it with a better one and all is well.

The problem is that this view is wrong.

Nobody falls into misbelief. People slide, slowly, pulled by four psychological forces. Every one of those forces is part of the standard human equipment. You are running all four right now. So am I.

Why do I use the term funnel

A funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Many people enter it, fewer continue down, and the further down you go the harder it becomes to climb back out. Not because the arguments get better. Because near the bottom, the walls are no longer made of arguments at all. They are made of relationships, identity, and the price of admitting that the last two years were a mistake.

The four forces

Emotional. This is the force at the top, and it starts with stress, particularly the unpredictable kind you cannot plan around. Stress makes us want a villain. Run that backwards and the appeal of a conspiracy becomes obvious. A story with a villain in it is a story where somebody is at the wheel. That is easier to live with than random harm that can attack again at any point.

Cognitive. This is what happens to the search once you are motivated to find something specific. You do not weigh evidence, you go looking for it, and the internet always has the answers you were looking for. And the cognitive elements do not end there. They include a few other components, including our tendency for little knowledge but overconfidence.

Personality. This is about who slides faster, and it is the uncomfortable section. Higher patternicity, which means seeing signal in noise, the sense of control, intellectual humility and narcissism, are all elements that fit the personality part of the funnel.

Social. This is what makes the whole thing permanent, and it is the force almost everyone underestimates. It is the main event. Once you are inside, leaving costs you every relationship you have left. Extremity stops being about the belief and starts being a way of belonging.

So I built a set of questions that walks you through it

You can use it to diagnose someone else, or yourself.

Each answer visibly moves one of four thermometers, with a short explanation of why it moved

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/funnel/

One more, for the force you most likely think does not apply to you

The cognitive force is the one nearly everybody exempts themselves from. Rather than argue with you about that, here is something additional that you can do to yourself in five minutes.

Rate how well you understand something you deeply believe in. Then explain how it actually works, step by step. Then rate yourself again. One belief, no score at the end. It asks what you can explain, not what you can defend, and the gap between the first rating and the second one is the entire point.

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/belief-audit/

Four conditions that make me more comfortable with paternalism

Let’s talk about paternalism. Paternalism and behavioral economics are deeply intertwined, and here is why. If you believe that people are perfectly rational, the conclusion is simple: let them make whatever decisions they want. After all, every one of their decisions is rational, so who are we to interfere? But the moment you start saying that we are irrational — that we are not designed to think long-term, that we are easily tempted, that computing compound interest is not something our brains do well — you have opened a different door. If people are predictably irrational, then maybe we also need to help improve their decisions. Maybe, sometimes, we need to limit their options.

And of course, in many areas of life we already accept paternalism without blinking. We accept traffic laws; you can’t just drive wherever you want, at whatever speed you want. You want to use heroin? No, you can’t do that either. And yet you can invest your money almost anywhere you want, in almost anything, with almost no one standing in your way. So the interesting question is not whether paternalism is good or bad in general. The interesting question is: when do we feel more comfortable being paternalistic, and when should we insist on leaving people alone?

After thinking about this question for a while, here are the conditions that, for me, make paternalism more acceptable.

Condition one: the decision is big and consequential. Think about retirement savings. A mistake there is not a bad lunch; it’s a mistake that shapes decades of your life.

Condition two: the decision is hard to reverse. This is connected to size, but it’s not the same thing. If you get your retirement wrong, you discover it at age 65, and there is no version of “oops, let’s start over.” Some mistakes come with an undo button, and some don’t. The ones that don’t deserve more protection.

Condition three: it is hard to learn from experience. If you ask me whether I prefer broccoli to cabbage, I don’t need anyone’s help — I can try both, and over time I’ll figure it out. Trial and error works beautifully for vegetables. But there are domains where we simply don’t get a good learning process. Much of medicine is like this: as individuals, we don’t get enough tries, the feedback is slow and noisy, and by the time we’ve “learned,” the lesson may have cost us dearly. Where learning is impossible, the case for letting everyone learn on their own collapses.

Condition four: there is a large information gap. I’m buying a house; the person selling it knows a great deal about it, and I know very little. I walk into a doctor’s office; my doctor knows a lot, and I know almost nothing. When one side of a decision holds most of the cards, “let the individual decide freely” is a nicer-sounding arrangement than it is a fair one.

Put these four together — a big decision, hard to reverse, resistant to learning, with deep information asymmetry — and under those conditions I feel much more comfortable saying: let’s not make everyone figure this out alone. Let’s do the work collectively, figure out what is good for most people, and make that the standard. Not a prison, a standard.

What is the right path for retirement savings? Should every person work it out for themselves, or should we say: big decision, impossible to learn from experience — let’s set sensible defaults? What should we do with people who got injured and are trying to make their way back to work? Should each of them navigate that maze alone, or are there some things we should do together?

Notice that the same four conditions also tell us when to keep our hands off. Small decision? Reversible? Easy to learn from? Both sides equally informed? Then leave people alone — that is exactly the territory where freedom to make our own mistakes is how we learn, and where paternalism has no business.

Now it’s your turn. If you have other conditions that you think should be on this list, I want to hear them. And if you think there are behaviors where I’m wrong — where we should be less paternalistic even though they rank high on all four conditions — let me know.

After I finish a lecture there is usually a line, and most of the people standing in it want a book signed. But someone always waits until the line is gone. They stand off to the side while the room empties out, and then they ask me the question I have now been asked in something like a dozen countries.

It is never “why do people believe this stuff.”

It is almost always “my brother.” Or “my mother.” Or “my closest friend since we were nine.” And then, more quietly: what do I do.

They are not asking for an explanation. They want instructions for what they could do next with people that they love.

What I say about this in Misbelief?

Misbelief is not stupidity. That is the first thing to say and the hardest thing for people to accept. Stupidity is a very comfortable explanation that allows us to ignore the person and the problem. It is also very incorrect. What I found instead was a funnel that takes people and changes them over time. It starts with stress that pushes people to look for anything that would explain to them what is going on. It is not any kind of stress that pushes us to find an answer, it is, especially the unpredictable kind of stress. The kind of stress that makes us wonder about what is really going on. After stress, our cognitive gets to work and after that personality joins in. Finally, the social forces of acceptance and belonging, echoing beliefs and becoming more extreme, cement the misbelief, and it makes leaving the group of misbelievers very expensive

I did not choose this subject. It chose me in 2020, when I started appearing in other people’s videos as an Illuminati henchman, complete with a speech I never gave.

The chapter I could not write

When I started working on Misbelief, I assumed I knew how the book would end. There would be a final chapter, and that chapter would tell you how to get your brother back.

I planned for it. I read for it. I spent two years interviewing for it.

I did not find it.

The trouble is that once people enter the funnel the forces to maintain them there are just too powerful. It also became clear that the standard responses of simply giving people more information or giving them some facts is not going to do much to change anyone’s opinion.

So, instead of one solutions chapter, the book grew small boxes scattered through it,wherever the research actually supported doing something. I called them “Hopefully Helpful.”

That name is not modesty. It is an accurate description of my confidence. Some of them will help some people some of the time, and I cannot tell you in advance which ones. There are 25, spread across chapters 3 through 11.

One is called “How to Have a Nondebate,” which is about removing the scoreboard from a conversation so that neither of you is playing to win. Another is “The Three Razors,” which hands you Occam’s razor, Hitchens’ razor, and a gentler version of Hanlon’s, offered as hygiene for your own thinking rather than as weapons for somebody else’s.

All 25, in one place

Enough people wrote asking me for specific pieces of advice that I finally pulled all 25 out of the book and put them into a single document. It is here for you to read.

https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf

I also realized that 25 pieces of advice might be too much to go through. Maybe it is Thursday. You are about to have a conversation on Sunday. You are already upset, and you are not going to read a booklet and work out which four paragraphs apply to you.

So the boxes became a tool. It asks up to three questions about the conversation you are actually about to have, and then hands you three of the 25. Not all of them. Three.

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/

I did not stop there and I created a second tool. This is not a tool to plan a conversation, it is a tool that was created to try and fix something about a conversation that maybe did not go the way you planned for it to go. It is a post-mortem you run the same evening, while it is still fresh. Thirteen questions, about three minutes.

The design of this tool, and what I think makes it worth while is that it asks what you did, not what you meant. From the inside, those two feel like the same thing. They are not, and the distance between them is where most of these conversations quietly go wrong.

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/

What I had to give up

Writing this book cost me a belief of my own. It was the belief that there is an answer that could make a person take a U-turn and come back. There isn’t such simple answer. What is left is smaller, and it is about aiming for small steps over time.

And here again are all the links. Hopefully, you will make good use of them.

The 25 boxes, free: https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf

Before the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/

After the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/

Before we argue for the perspective of a particular political party, it’s worth pausing for a question an American philosopher posed more than fifty years ago. When I asked thousands of people to answer it honestly, I discovered something surprising: our disagreements are far smaller than we think.

Imagine the following exercise: tomorrow morning, you are born again. You don’t know which family you’ll arrive into. Maybe a wealthy home, maybe a poor one. Maybe a big city in the center of the country, maybe a remote town. Maybe you’ll be born healthy, maybe with a serious illness. You know nothing about the particular situation you’ll be born into. Now ask yourself: what would you want that country to look like? How would you want it to treat its citizens?

This exercise was proposed in 1971 by the American philosopher John Rawls, in a book — “A Theory of Justice” — that is considered to this day one of the cornerstones of thinking about justice. Rawls called the idea “the veil of ignorance,” and his claim was simple and profound: a just society is one you would be willing to enter it in a random position.

A just society is a society we would be willing to enter first and only then learn that we have been born into a particular economic setting, a medical condition, a gender, and ethnicity.

Under normal circumstances, when we are asked whether our country is a just one, we answer partly from the perspective of justice — but we can’t help but to also answer from the perspective of our own narrow, particular interests. The rich tend to think high taxes are a bad idea; the poor tend to think the opposite. And these narrow interests shape our sense of justice in every domain of life.

But behind the veil of ignorance, when we don’t know whether we will end up at the top or at the bottom, only the question of justice itself remains. What, really, is a just country?

For years, the veil of ignorance served as an important exercise in philosophy seminars. Then my colleagues and I decided to see what happens when you hand it to real people. We asked them to design a country that would be, in their eyes, just — from behind the veil of ignorance. We surveyed a representative sample of more than five thousand Americans: rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats.

What we learned from the results was that Americans thought a just country would be even more equal than Sweden. And, of course, they thought that the actual distribution of wealth in the United States is very far from just.

What was even more interesting: the agreement. Rich and poor, Republicans and Democrat voters (in the 2004 election), men and women — all of them drew remarkably similar ideal distributions. In the noisy political debate, they seem like they are serious enemies. Behind the veil of ignorance, the distance between them nearly disappears.

As our own elections approach, it’s worth running this exercise on our own political beliefs. Ask yourself honestly: would you be willing to enter today’s United States of America in a random position? And if the answer is no — what USA would you design from behind the veil of ignorance?

My guess, based on what we saw in the study, is that if we think in veil-of-ignorance terms, we will discover that we want a very different country from the one we have — and also, mainly, that we agree on much more than we think.

If you find this topic interesting, I’m attaching  below two links, one for a very wonderful YouTube video that somebody did about our research, and another one for a short TED lecture I gave on the same topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_how_equal_do_we_want_the_world_to_be_you_d_be_surprised

David Pitt reviews my new book in this month’s edition of Booklist.

Full link to Booklist: https://booklist.booklistonline.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=6d2991a4-9d82-4321-9c01-8a678a578755

My new book MISBELIEF will be out on September 19th! You can pre-order it here https://misbeliefbook.com.

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,

Every time my sister hosts a dinner party, she insists that every last tidbit of food she serves be homemade. This high standard is wearing on her. To make her life easier, I proposed buying a few items, but she balked at the idea. Why is she so invested in making everything from scratch, despite the stress?

—Roxanne 

Your sister might be experiencing a “perfection premium,” which is the tendency to overrate something because it’s perfect—and in her case, 100% homemade.

The perfection premium was demonstrated in a study about socks. Researchers asked some people how much more they would pay for socks that were 100% Merino wool compared with socks that were 98% Merino wool. They asked others about their willingness to pay for socks that were 96% Merino wool compared with socks that were 94%Merino. In both cases, the question was about the value they placed on an additional 2% wool—but in the first case, that 2% made the socks a perfect 100% wool, while in the second case, it was just an increase of 2% more Merino wool. The participants were willing to pay much more for the 2% increase when it brought the total to a perfect 100% compared to when it was just a 2% increase.

These findings show that people place a premium on perfection, perhaps because we put things that are perfect in a different mental category than those that are near-perfect. For your sister, making 95% of a meal from scratch rather than 100% may have the benefit of saving time, but it would cost her with the loss of the perfection premium. With this in mind, Instead of interfering with her pride in a perfectly home-cooked meal, you could try to work with it—for example, by suggesting that she purchase desserts from a baker at a local farmer’s market. These items aren’t technically ‘homemade,” but you might be able to help her think about them as such.

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Dear Dan,

My teenage kids spend a lot of time on their phones, especially on social media. I’m worried about what all this screen time does to their mental health. Should I put strict limits on their screen time?

—Yasmin 

How your kids use their devices matters much more than for how long they use them —especially during times when face-to-face interactions are limited, such as school vacations or during COVID-19.

Over a period of six weeks during Peru’s most stringent COVID-19 lockdown, researchers in Peru surveyed teenagers about screen time. They asked about their subjects’ experiences online: their feelings of loneliness or of wellbeing and their sources of social support. The study found that chatting with friends and family or joining multiplayer video games had a positive effect on the teenagers and left them feeling less lonely and with higher well-being. Passive engagements, on the other hand—such as enviously scrolling through retouched Instagram selfies—took a toll on teens’ loneliness and wellbeing.

Given that forming friendships and interacting with people outside of the family is especially important to teenagers, spending more time online during COVID could be positive, provided that the time online is used to actively engage with others and not to passively engage with the digital world.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal.

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’m worried that I’ve gotten into the habit of watching too much TV during this time of social isolation. I know it’s not good for me to spend hours in front of the screen, so why do I feel so drawn to these shows?

—Shirleene 

Don’t judge yourself too harshly. Seeking ways to feel connected to others is natural, and now that physical distancing guidelines make in-person connections increasingly difficult, many people are finding a replacement in watching television or engaging with online communities. Research has found that this isn’t a bad strategy. Nontraditional social connections, even to fictional characters on TV, has been found to increase well-being during quarantine. Just don’t forget that TV is a substitute until you can go back to seeing people in real life.

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Dear Dan,

I run an Etsy business. A few weeks ago I made some mistakes and sent several long-term customers the wrong items. What should I do to keep their business and earn back their trust?

—Adrien 

Running a small business is challenging, and mistakes will happen from time to time. Fortunately, a well-executed apology and stellar follow-up service can help. In a 2019 study on the “economics of apologies,” researchers looked at a large set of vendors and over a million of their customers and came away with four main insights about effective apologies. First, make sure to recognize the impact of your mistake on your customer: “I know it was disappointing not to not have the right gift in time for the holiday.” Second, explain what you are doing to make sure it won’t happen again. Third, the apology must come at some cost to you. Customers who had a bad experience were more likely to continue their patronage when they were sent a coupon for future purchases. Finally, make sure to improve. An apology can actually be worse than no apology at all if the mistake is repeated.

By the way, the same principles are relevant when making a personal apology to friends or family.

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Dear Dan,

My son is taking an Advanced Placement physics class in high school. He attends classes, spends hours studying and says he knows the material very well, yet his test scores are not very good. How is that possible?

—Damien 

One possible explanation for the discrepancy could be “the illusion of explanatory depth,” which says that people often mistake familiarity with understanding. This principle was elegantly demonstrated in studies where participants were asked to rate their understanding of everyday objects like toilets and bicycles. Most people expressed a high degree of certainty that they understood how these things worked, but when asked to draw and explain them, they couldn’t. (If you think it sounds easy, try to draw a bicycle without leaving out any parts.)

With this distinction in mind, you can see if your son’s confidence is justified by asking him to explain the course material to you. This might help him identify which parts he only thought he understood.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal.

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,

It feels like I’ve been cooped up with my wife and children for a year, and I’ve started to lose my temper about things that never bothered me before, like when the kids make noise. I can’t run away from home, but I don’t want to feel angry all the time either. What can I do to lower my stress level?

—Harvey 

Your desire to run away makes sense. One of the best things we can do when strong emotions bubble up is distance ourselves physically from the source of those feelings—in this case, your family. If you live in a place where you can safely go outside, next time you get angry go for a walk or a run and don’t come back for 30 minutes. That should be enough time for your emotions to subside.

You mention getting along with your family as the main source of stress, but like most people these days, you’re probably also worrying about bigger issues like your safety and your financial future. These kinds of worries make us feel helpless, and the best way to combat that feeling is to find ways to take control of our lives. This could mean waking up at the same time every day, starting an exercise plan so you can see your progress over time, or learning a new skill like cooking. Covid-19 will be with us for a while, and we need to figure out how to live with it without non-stop stress.

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Dear Dan,

Working from home for the last few months has been bad for my eating habits, since it’s so easy to snack throughout the day. I’ve gained weight, and I want to go on a diet, but I’m still working at home, so the temptations aren’t going away. What diet would work best in this situation?

—Julie 

Planning a healthy diet is even harder now than usual, since going to the supermarket is more difficult and some ingredients are harder to get. To make things easier, try intermittent fasting, where you can eat anything you want for eight hours a day but fast for the other 16. Research shows that diets are easiest to keep when they have clear and simple rules like this one.

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Dear Dan,

Recently my girlfriend broke up with me, and I can’t stop thinking about her. We were together for many years, and I was deeply in love. Now I can’t control my feelings: Every day I go from anger to mourning to fantasizing about getting back together. What can I do to start moving on with my life?

—Ari 

When someone we love dies, we have ceremonies like funerals and wakes to help us mourn. These rituals mark the conclusion of our relationship with the person we’ve lost, allowing us to focus on our pain, express it and put it behind us. If we kept fantasizing that the loved one was coming back, we’d never be able to move forward.

There aren’t any established rituals for mourning the loss of a loved one in a break-up, but there should be, so try creating one for yourself—some formal way of acknowledging that the relationship is over and won’t be coming back. This won’t take away your pain, but it should help you start recovering from it sooner.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal.

Hello, join me tomorrow, April 24th at 12pm EST for a live chat about the intersections of behavioral science and the coronavirus pandemic. There will be a live Q&A portion at the end!

Here is the event link. See you there!