A few years ago, my university introduced a new procedure: every research center would submit a quarterly report. I knew what this was. Anyone who has spent time inside a large institution knows what this is. It was a document that would exist so that someone could say a document existed.
But I decided to treat it differently. I gathered the whole lab and made the case that if we had to write this thing anyway, we might as well write it well, and that describing everything we were doing, with real depth, might teach us something about ourselves as a lab. People bought in. We worked hard. The report was long, well reasoned, carefully documented, and submitted on time.
What came back, almost six months later, was a note about serial numbers. Someone had checked each of our research protocols against another list and found that a few numbers didn’t match. That was the only focus of the review process. Nothing about what we were studying, or why, or what we had found.
I want to be precise about what happened, because it isn’t quite the usual story. Our report wasn’t thrown away, and it wasn’t ignored. Somebody read it. They just read it for the one thing that didn’t matter and passed over everything that did. I remember the feeling in the lab afterward: not anger, exactly, but deflation, and a quiet collective decision that next quarter we would not try so hard.
That feeling is the subject of this essay. How much does it cost when the work we do disappears into a drawer or a shredder? And how little would it take to prevent it?
Legos
In 2008, Emir Kamenica, Drazen Prelec and I tried to put a number on this. We paid people to build Lego Bionicle figures. The pay started at two dollars and dropped by a few cents with each figure, so that at some point everyone would decide the next one wasn’t worth it and stop.
The only difference between our two conditions was what happened to the figures afterward. In one, each finished Bionicle went under the table, to be taken apart at the end of the session. In the other, the experimenter dismantled it right in front of the participant, while they were starting the next one, and put the pieces back in the box to be rebuilt. We called this the Sisyphean condition.
Same pay, same task, same Legos. People in the first condition built about eleven figures. People in the Sisyphean condition built about seven. And a smaller finding that I still think about: in the first condition, people who loved Legos built more, as you’d expect. In the Sisyphean condition, that relationship vanished. Watching your work get destroyed severed the link between enjoying something and doing it.
We then ran a version with a task nobody could love: finding pairs of identical adjacent letters on sheets of random text, again for declining pay. In one condition the experimenter glanced at each finished sheet, nodded, and put it on a pile. In another, the sheet went on the pile unread. In the third, it went into a shredder. The acknowledged group kept working until the pay dropped to about fifteen cents a sheet. The shredded group quit at about twenty-nine cents. The ignored group quit at about twenty-eight.
Hold on to that. Being ignored was as bad as being shredded, and a glance and a nod were worth almost half the pay. When we asked a separate group to predict these results, they got the direction right and the size badly wrong. They assumed meaning would matter a little. It mattered a lot. We titled the paper, with a wink at Viktor Frankl (1959), “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos” (Ariely, Kamenica & Prelec, 2008).
What we didn’t know
The study had limits. Our participants were adults in a single session, and meaning took one form: your work survives for an hour. Three questions stayed open. How small a dose of meaning is enough? Is this need something we absorb from years of jobs and performance reviews, or is it there earlier? And does meaning change what people choose to do, not just how long they persist?
The traditional view in developmental psychology was that the need for significance arrives in adolescence or later (Damon, Menon & Bronk, 2003). Erikson (1968) placed concerns about legacy in mid-life; Maslow (1971) put meaning near the top of his pyramid, a mark of the self-actualized. On that view, a four-year-old shouldn’t care whether her drawing gets kept.
Meaning at age four
This summer, Yilin Liu and Fan Yang (2026) published a paper in Psychological Science that adapted our task for children between four and nine, with adults tested alongside them. The setup was even more minimal than ours. Children could build a heart out of puzzle pieces, and the heart would either go in a box or be taken apart. Nothing was said about how long the box would be kept, whether they’d see the heart again, or what it was for. It would simply exist, or not.
About eighty percent of the children chose the box game, and said building the heart mattered more there. So did about eighty percent of the adults. Then the researchers asked whether people would pay for this. One game cost a sticker, the other was free. When both games saved the heart, eighty-five percent of the children took the free one. When only the costly game saved the heart, half of them gave up the sticker. And this happened only when they had made the heart themselves; when the choice was about watching pieces move on their own and be saved or not, nobody paid. We don’t want objects to survive. We want our own work to survive.
The third study is the closest to our Legos. Participants were offered an easier option: skip the heart and just move the pieces into the box. When the heart would be saved, eighty-three percent of adults built it anyway. When it would be taken apart, only thirty-four percent did. Among the children, the older they were, the more likely they were to take the easy way out when their work was doomed. Somewhere between four and nine, we learn that if it’s going to be destroyed, don’t bother.
Finally, the researchers tried the obvious fix and told one group that the point of the game was to have fun. It helped, but it did not close the gap. Enjoyment compensates for missing meaning partially, not fully.
Two things follow. The dose of meaning required is tiny: a box, with no promise attached. And the need is there before anyone has explained to us what impact or legacy is supposed to mean.
Not a lab curiosity
If this were only Legos and puzzle hearts, you could dismiss it. Adam Grant (2008) had university fundraisers spend five minutes with a student whose scholarship their calls had funded; in the following month they raised far more than colleagues who hadn’t. Dana Chandler and Adam Kapelner (2013) paid crowdworkers to label medical images; those told the images were tumor cells for cancer research labeled more of them, and more carefully, for identical pay. Economists now write review articles about work as a source of meaning (Cassar & Meier, 2018), and people reliably say they’d accept lower salaries for work that matters (Hu & Hirsh, 2017). Meaning is not a soft benefit. It behaves like a wage.
Why organizations shred without noticing
Nobody at my university set out to demoralize a lab. That is exactly the problem. Three things make shredding invisible to the people doing it.
The first is the prediction failure from our third experiment: managers know meaning matters and underestimate by how much, so they never budget for it. The second is that shredding is usually a side effect of tidiness. Reorganizations, cancelled projects, dashboards that count outputs, compliance checks on serial numbers: each is sensible housekeeping, and each quietly tells someone that the part of their work they cared about was not the part anyone looked at. The third is speed. Liu and Yang (2026) end their paper worrying about fragmented, transient engagement, and I’d extend the worry to how we now work with AI: drafts generated and discarded in seconds, nothing looked at twice. We are building environments that are very good at making things and very bad at keeping them.
The cheapest intervention in management
The lesson is not “make work meaningful,” which sounds expensive and vague. It’s narrower. Find where you are shredding, and stop. Find where you are ignoring, and look, and nod. A glance was worth almost half the pay in 2008. A box was enough for a four-year-old in 2026.
When the serial-number memo arrived, all it would have taken was one sentence at the top: “We read this; the work on X looks interesting.” It would have cost nothing. Instead my lab learned what the nine-year-olds learned: if it’s going to be shredded, don’t bother. Meaning is cheap to give and expensive to withhold, and we are remarkably bad at noticing when we withhold it.
References
Ariely, D., Kamenica, E., & Prelec, D. (2008). Man’s search for meaning: The case of Legos. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 67(3–4), 671–677.
Liu, Y., & Yang, F. (2026). Moved by the lightest touch of meaning: Even minimal significance matters for motivation from childhood. Psychological Science, 37(8). https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976261462874
Grant, A. M. (2008). The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(1), 108–124.
Chandler, D., & Kapelner, A. (2013). Breaking monotony with meaning: Motivation in crowdsourcing markets. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 90, 123–133.
Cassar, L., & Meier, S. (2018). Nonmonetary incentives and the implications of work as a source of meaning. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32(3), 215–238.
Hu, J., & Hirsh, J. B. (2017). Accepting lower salaries for meaningful work. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1649.
Damon, W., Menon, J., & Bronk, K. C. (2003). The development of purpose during adolescence. Applied Developmental Science, 7(3), 119–128.
Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. W. Norton.
Maslow, A. H. (1971). The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Viking.
Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
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Like We have always found ways to feel productive while avoiding the hard work of thinking. AI agents just gave us the best one yet.
There’s a term in behavioral economics that I think helps organize the world in a very interesting way. There are many such terms, but this is one I particularly love: structured procrastination.
The idea is that we want two things at the same time, and they pull in opposite directions. We want to feel that we are making progress. But we also want to procrastinate — not to put in hard effort right now. The hard effort we happily assign to some future version of ourselves; the present version prefers to do things that are easy and fun. Structured procrastination is a kind of compromise we strike between these two desires: activity that delivers the feeling of progress without demanding the effort.
In the old days, we had two main ways of managing this balance.
The first was tidying. We organized our desks. We wrote to-do lists — and if we were really good at this, the first item on the to-do list was “write a to-do list,” so that we could cross something off within seconds. We got the sensation of achievement without investing any real energy.
The second was paperwork. Whenever something difficult and complex was waiting for us, we could escape into it: forms, procedures, all the tasks that don’t require much thought but give us the feeling that we are moving forward. After all, at some point this paperwork has to be done. Why not now?
The third version
I think a third version of structured procrastination — and surely the most interesting one — is emerging now, in the era of AI, and in particular of AI agents. This one is more seductive than its predecessors, because it lets us feel that we are making progress while avoiding the hardest work of all: actual thinking.
Imagine you have a real task in front of you. One path is to think, think, think, plan, plan, plan — and then execute. This is difficult, and not only because thinking is effortful. It’s difficult because as you think and plan, you might discover that you got things wrong. That your idea is not at the quality you expected. That there are parts you can’t yet solve. Thinking is where our ideas get confronted, and confrontation is uncomfortable.
The other path is to take a half-baked thought and send your agent to start working on it.
Here is what makes this genuinely new. Until the era of AI, structured procrastination was a choice between tasks. We could pick something that required deep thinking, or we could pick something shallow — the to-do list, the emails, the bureaucracy. Now the choice lives inside a single task. Let’s say I need to accomplish something for work. Within that very same task, I can decide to spend a lot of mental energy — be deliberate, be thoughtful, make a plan — or I can simply say to my agent: “Hey, I have this half-baked idea. Start working.”
Tokens are the new to-do list
Remember that structured procrastination is a balance: we don’t want to spend the effort of thinking, but we still want to feel that we’re getting somewhere. So where does the feeling of progress come from in this new version?
It comes, in magnificent form, from watching our AI agent burn tokens.
In the past, you would write a to-do list and cross things off, and every crossed-off line gave you a small hit of progress. Now you can watch the agent work. You can see the output streaming, the tasks being spawned, the tokens being consumed — and that gives you exactly the same feeling. Something is happening. Things are moving. I am making progress. Not only that, but it’s burning millions of tokens. What a great feeling of progress. So much hard work is being invested — and there is a counter to prove it.
So what I would like to argue is that we have entered a new era of structured procrastination. It is no longer just about the choice between tasks; we can now procrastinate inside a task. And the feedback we get in the form of tokens consumed is a bottomless supply of exactly the satisfaction that structured procrastination demands from us. The to-do list eventually ran out of items. The token counter never runs out.
What doesn’t change
The uncomfortable part is that the thinking still has to happen. The question is only when. If we do it before we hit “run,” we discover the holes in our idea cheaply, while they are still just thoughts. If we skip it and let the agent run, we discover many of the same holes later — after the tokens have been spent, and after we have grown attached to output that looks finished.
So here is a small test I’m trying on myself. Before I send an agent off to work, I ask: have I done enough of the difficult thinking? If the honest answer is no, then what I’m about to do isn’t delegation. It’s structured procrastination with a very convincing progress bar.
I’d be curious to hear your version. What is your “hey agent, start working” moment — and what did it let you avoid?
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.
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
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.
The good life is behind the more difficult door.
Imagine that you have two apartments in the same building, on the same floor, two doors right next to each other. In one apartment lives your human spouse. In the other apartment lives a robotic version of that spouse. And imagine that we are a few years into the future, so the technology is not today’s clumsy technology. The AI is better, the robotics are better, the whole thing is convincing.
Now, imagine that you come home at night from a difficult day at work. You are stressed, you are worried, you are depleted. And as you walk down the hallway toward the two doors, you start thinking: which door am I going to open tonight?
Behind one door, the robotic spouse is waiting. The robotic spouse always compliments you. Always supports you. It knows your needs, it anticipates them before you say a word, and it makes you feel good right now, at this moment. Behind the other door is your human spouse, who is basically the same as your human spouse right now. Maybe they also had a difficult day. Maybe they want to talk about the thing you forgot to do.
So which door do you pick to open?
Now imagine that it is a year later. Over the past year, some nights you opened the door to your human spouse, and some nights you opened the door to your robotic spouse. A year into this arrangement, how is your relationship with your human spouse? Most likely, it is worse than when you started. Relationships are not frozen in place. They grow when we invest in them and they shrink when we don’t, and every night behind the robotic door was a night of not investing. Or more correctly, it was a night with the opposite of investing.
And here is the important part: the decline does not stop, and it does not even stay at the same speed. In year two, your human spouse is not hurt the way they were in year one. They are more hurt. They have had another year of watching you choose the other door, another year of feeling compared to a machine that never has a bad day. So they become a little angrier, a little more distant, a little less pleasant to come home to. Which means that in year three the human door is even less inviting than it was in year two, so you open it even less often, so they become even more hurt, and even more hurtful. The relationship is not just worse. It is getting worse faster.
What about five years later? I am willing to guess that five years in, your relationship with your human spouse would be so much worse that on most nights you would not want to see them, and they would not want to see you. And so, one comfortable evening at a time, you would end up with the robotic spouse almost every night. Not because the robot won. Because the human relationship, starved night after night, slowly lost.
Here is the part that worries me. Nobody would ever sit down, look at their life as a whole, and choose a robotic spouse as their picture of a good life. If we made the choice once, seeing the whole road ahead, almost all of us would choose the human. But that is not how we will face the choice. We will face it one night at a time, tired and stressed, standing in front of two doors, and on each individual night the easy door will win. The choices will be small and local, and the outcome will be large and permanent.
Of course, I am not really talking about robotic spouses. I am talking about how we use AI in general.
Every day, many times a day, we stand in front of our own version of the two doors. We can struggle with writing something, get stuck, fight with the words, and eventually produce something we are proud of. Or we can hand it off to an AI model and produce it with much more efficiency and none of the struggle. We can think through a hard decision ourselves or ask for the answer. We can practice a skill, or delegate it. Each easy choice makes perfect sense on its own. And each easy choice also takes a small bite out of the person we were hoping to become.
Why is this so worrisome? Because we are not static either. The same decay that happens to the neglected relationship happens to the neglected skill. Take my own case, writing. If I hand my writing to AI today, tomorrow I will be a slightly worse writer. Not dramatically worse, just a little. But if I handed writing fully to AI every day for a year, my ability to write to reason through an argument, to come up with something genuinely creative, will have undoubtedly go down. Exactly the way the relationship behind the human door went down. And the spiral has the same cruel shape. The spouse who is chosen less becomes angrier and harder to choose; the skill that is used less becomes weaker and harder to use. In year two I am a worse writer than in year one, so the gap between what I can produce and what the AI can produce is bigger, so the easy door is even more tempting, so in year three the gap is bigger still. The person behind the human door became more hurtful every year. The writer behind my own door became weaker every year.
So what do we do? I would like to propose a simple principle: a good life is a life where we take the core things we care most about and keep them for ourselves. Not everything. There is plenty that AI should do for us, and I am happy to hand over the scheduling, the paperwork, the tasks that were never going to make us grow. But the core things, the relationships we want to be in and the skills that define us, those we protect. A good life is a life where we keep developing. Where we invest in our relationships and don’t run from them and we choose deliberately to invest in our most important skills and don’t hand them off.
The technology will keep getting better. The robotic door will keep getting more attractive. The big question, and I mean this as a real question and not a rhetorical one, is whether we will have the wisdom to make the right choices when we face our two doors.
Originally published at THE HILL.COM on 07/13/2024
When Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed a law in June requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state, it reignited the longstanding debate over the separation of church and state.
Opponents are pleading with federal judges to block the mandate before the school year begins in August. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation are actively seeking to challenge the law in court, arguing it is “blatantly unconstitutional.”
From my perspective as a social scientist, a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be hung over every classroom across the state is flawed for reasons that go beyond its constitutionality. I see it as a fundamentally ineffective mandate, because heaps of research say so. And did I mention it would be a waste of tax dollars?
In the extensive research on human dishonesty, one clear finding emerges: Passive reminders of ethical conduct, like displaying the Ten Commandments, do not significantly influence behavior. To instill moral values and ethical behavior, active engagement and a sense of relevance are crucial. Simply hanging up a poster of the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall would not foster the active, lived experience of ethical principles.
Consider the Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians. Properly invoked, the Hippocratic Oath inspires students of medicine and practitioners alike to actively engage with its ethical calling and think about its principles at important moments, not just because it has been deeply ingrained in the fabric of the medical community. Unlike passive displays, active engagement creates a sense of commitment to ethical principles, which opens the door to more ethical behavior.
Louisiana’s new law exemplifies bureaucracy at its worst — it imposes a mandate based on a principle that extensive research has shown to be ineffective. It’s not just controversial; it will make schools feel as if they have dealt with the problem of ethics, when in fact they will not have.
Moreover, the assumption that the Ten Commandments can serve as a universal moral code is increasingly out of touch with contemporary American society. Over the past few decades, the relationship of the average American with religion has become more diffuse, and the influence of traditional religious codes has decreased.
Research conducted over the past decades on moral reminders concludes that active engagement with the moral reminder — such as the Ten Commandments — can decrease dishonesty. But, given Americans’ waning religiosity, that effect is diminished.
For the Ten Commandments to have an impact on thought or behavior, people have to first buy into the idea that the Ten Commandments are a meaningful set of moral rules. Displaying a moral code that doesn’t carry meaning is the equivalent of hanging a poster written in a foreign language.
Together, these two points mean that if someone wants to increase the ethics of our schools and the ethical behavior of our students, the first thing they need to ensure is that the set of moral principles has very deep and broad buy-in.
Next, the engagement with this set of ethical reminders has to be active and intentional. Of course, such programs are much more complex to carry out than simply hanging the Ten Commandments in different corners of schools — but they have the advantage that they might also work to have an impact.
Finally, the trend of setting up rules that are designed to make a political splash and maybe get some headlines but are not thoughtfully designed for efficacy further erodes our trust in politicians and institutions at large — government, corporations and even academia.
As these institutions lose their authority, there is a collective rejection of standard norms of behavior, which I believe are at play in our so-called “culture wars” and other societal trends that have upended American society in recent years.
The breakdown of trust in government and moral codes that historically guided Americans poses a critical question for our democracy: Can we still function effectively without a shared belief system? As we head into another election year, this question becomes even more pressing. Yet its implications extend far beyond politics.
Without a sense of mutual agreement on our ethical principles and without trust that the people leading us are truly interested in our long-term well-being, any efforts to improve behavior — whether through passive or active means — are doomed to fail.
Link to original publication: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4768231-louisiana-ten-commandments-law/