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,
Any tips for encouraging kids to view their homework as play?
—Gordon
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Dear Dan,
I no longer enjoy my job, and I am considering quitting and volunteering for a few years at a local organization that does great work. Will my self-worth drop if I no longer have a job?
—Sabrina
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Dear Dan,
Is it better to shower at night or in the morning?
—Rachael
No question about it: at night. We get dirtier more quickly when we interact with the outside world, so showering first thing in the morning means that we will spend the rest of the day and all night in a grimy state. But if you shower at night, you will be clean while you sleep and thus maximize the number of cleanliness-hours per shower—clearly a better approach.
See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.
Tweet 
Like Was my previous post about Trump supporters having small penises an April Fool’s joke?
Partially.
While we did, in fact, conduct the research, and the results are true, the data isn’t about the relationship between real size and skills. It’s about what people think about this relationships. For example, this means that Donald Trump supporters don’t necessarily have small penises (they might, we never checked), it’s just that people think they do.
The same logic applies to the rest of the findings I described in the blog post (http://danariely.com/2016/03/31/trump-supporters-linked-with-having-small-penises/).
Yet, it is interesting what people think that penis size is so linked to so many attributes such as confidence, ability in math etc.
Irrationally yours
Dan
WASHINGTON, DC, USA, March 30, 2016
After decades of attempting to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems, such as poverty, conflict, and economic mismanagement, the World Bank announced today that it will now tackle the principal cause of human misery.
Under the leadership of the Bank’s president Jim Yong Kim and the Bank’s new Global INsights Initiative (GINI), the World Bank’s analytics have become more penetrating and its operational agenda far more daring.
“We are excited by the opportunity to address the root cause of the world’s greatest conflicts,” said Kim, the bank’s president. “People, and how they just can’t get along.”
Fractured relationships have been increasing monotonically for several decades. The frequency of marital fights, rising divorce rates, and the substantial increase in short term relationships – facilitated by apps such as Tinder – make this initiative a necessary next step for the Bank and the world, claims Varun Gauri, who is the lead for the new task force.
“Within five years,” said Gauri, “The team will provide a definitive answer to why couples fight so much.”
This five-year initiative will include educating the public in various topics pertaining to effective relationships, piloting different family structure arrangements, and conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of new marriage contracts. Among the many topics that the task force is expected to study are: Teen dating decisions (i.e. who to date, who not to date, how to roll your eyes at your parents advice), timing marriages, correct strategies for marital fights (i.e. how to argue effectively, things to fight about, how to make sure the couch is comfortable after those fights), money management in the home, techniques for effective and productive makeup sex, and how to properly raise children.
There will be a social accountability component in which individuals dissatisfied with their marriages will be able to call the World Bank. There will also be a worldwide dating app on the World Bank website.
“It is not as if men are really from Mars and women from Venus,” said Kim. “But let’s just say that when men try to meet women halfway, on Earth, they usually get lost and don’t stop to ask for directions.”
The initiative is being supported by a $38.2 million grant from the Hallmark Corporation a $7 million grant from the Gates foundation, and a $20.7 million grant from the Swedish government.
“Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship agrees that this is a very good use of resources,” added Gauri. “They say money can’t buy you love, but it can help us figure out why it’s so hard to make relationship work.”
The World Bank plans to complete this initiative by the year 2021.
A 69 year old man’s penis captured America’s attention in last month’s Republican debate. Donald Trump broadcast the size of his penis on national television in a response to Marco Rubio’s comment on his small “hands”: If they’re small, something else must be small.
Lifting his hands from the podium, Trump declared to the country, “Look at these hands! Are these small hands?” He added, “I guarantee you, there’s no problem.” As an indication of the importance of the topic, the media responded with extensive coverage of the moment for weeks.
Clearly, penis size is an important attribute. As the comments by Trump and Rubio indicate, the matter at hand isn’t just about size—it’s about the link to a many other skills and capabilities. What kind of skills is penis size connected to? Could it be ability in business, confidence, leadership? What else?
To find out, we studied over 1,400 people across the country to better understand the relationship between penis size and various skills and attributes.
Not everyone may agree on how many inches constitutes a small or large penis, so to measure the means, we used a scale that measured magnitude instead of inches. Positive numbers indicate largeness while negative numbers indicate smallness.
Men with large penises were:
- more confident (41.78)
- more likely to ask for the phone number of a person more attractive than themselves (30.98)
- better lovers (30.12)
- and generally better at sex (29.34)
- with a higher sex drive (27.7).
Taking attributes related to sex out of the picture, the top five attributes become:
- being more confident (41.78)
- more willing to ask for an undeserved pay raise at work (21.76)
- being more optimistic (19.04)
- and taking more risk by both not fearing walking home at night in an unsafe part of town (19.02)
- and by engaging in dangerous recreational sports (17.94).
The top 5 attributes men with small penises exhibited were:
- voting for Donald Trump (-16.2)
- being religious (-11.9)
- more inclined to gossip (-9.54)
- being good at math (-9.64)
- and driving a large car (-8.36).
We also asked our participants to report their actual penis measurements and found an interesting distinction along political party lines. Democrats and Republicans equally inflated their size by adding on an extra inch compared with the national length average, but Republicans reported significantly larger ball sizes (11.5) than did Democrats (6.04). Do Republicans really have larger balls or do they only believe they do? This is an important question for future research.
One final note: While Donald Trump supporters seem to have smaller penises, it is important to note that this initial research focused on the size of erect penises. Donald Trump never made it clear (and interestingly no journalist asked him) if he was referring to the erect or flaccid size. Regardless of what state of penis Donald Trump had in mind, since men spend most of their days with a flaccid penis, the question about the size when flaccid is just as important, if not more important, and we hope to study it in the years to come.
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,
Ratings systems for different services often aren’t driven by incentives. One example: Instead of just rating Uber and Lyft drivers after they drop us off, what if their ratings were based on the size of the tips they got? In such a system, drivers who consistently received larger tips would get higher ratings; those who were penalized would be seen less favorably. Wouldn’t this be better than the current rating system?
—Ruoxi
Would you really give a bad tip to an annoying driver who had just dropped you off at home and knows where you live? (I am partially joking here, but I do wonder whether tips for taxis are higher when people are coming back home.)
Like other pay-for-performance approaches, your proposal for a tip-based ratings system would raise a lot of problems. First, discretionary payments such as tips reflect satisfaction, but they also reflect wealth and price sensitivity. Basically, some people care less about money and are likely to give higher tips than more price-sensitive people. Since the wealth and the price sensitivity of the passenger aren’t a precise reflection of the quality of the driver, your suggestion would just replace one flawed system with another. A second, even more serious problem: Drivers would get an incentive to drive more in areas where people are less bothered by high prices, thereby providing worse service to other people who might need transportation more. Finally, what would stop drivers from giving cash back to passengers who gave them larger tips—returning some of the extra money but gaining reputation points in the process?
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Dear Dan,
Some time ago, I bought some bitcoins. In just a few months, their value increased by 1,000%. They’ve just kept rising and are now about 4,000% higher than when I originally purchased them. My original investment is now worth more than $100,000—a substantial amount of money for me. Should I sell or hold onto them and hope for further increases?
—Geoff
It is hard for me to say whether this is a good investment or not, but here’s a more rational perspective for examining the question: Simply ask yourself if you would buy these bitcoins now, at their current price. If your answer is yes, you should hold onto your investment and maybe even buy more. But if your answer is no, it means that you don’t really think that the expected increase in value is worth the risk, and you should sell.
The more general point here is that our investment decisions should be about what we think the future will hold (hard as that is to predict), and we need to work hard to overcome the influences of our past actions. No matter what you purchased a given investment for, and regardless of what it is worth now, you should make your decisions only about where you think this investment is headed.
One last piece of advice: If you do decide to sell your bitcoins, don’t look up their value afterward. Yes, if the value drops, you’d be a bit happier that you sold, but if the value rose, your misery would be much higher—so resist the urge to check.
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,
I’m organizing a long weekend of skiing with 10 friends who have very different financial situations. I’d like everyone to be able to pay what that they’re comfortable with, and I also want to avoid creating an awkward social dynamic. I considered charging everyone a low base amount and then asking the wealthier friends to pay extra, but that doesn’t seem quite right. What’s the best way to divide up the cost?
—Zach
Dear Dan,
Why do I still listen to the radio and watch live TV when I have access to all the same content from different streaming services, which lets me skip what I don’t like and more easily change my experience?
—Colin
One possibility is that you are listening to the radio and watching live TV because you don’t want to have the ability to switch. When you just experience something that cannot be changed, you are more likely to get into the flow and fully enjoy it. By contrast, when you are continuously monitoring the experience and asking yourself how happy you are, it can be exhausting, ultimately taking away from the sense of immersion. Sometimes the freedom to choose among options isn’t a recipe for happiness.
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Dear Dan,
I recently experienced some turbulent emotional times, and I realized that I was eating a lot of chocolate and gaining weight. I am now wondering if chocolate really has mood-improving powers, as many people seem to think, or if I just gained weight for no good reason.
—Mia
Some research has found that chocolate can in fact boost your mood—perhaps due to compounds found in cocoa. Interestingly, women seem to be more likely than men to eat chocolate to try to boost their moods. That could mean that experiencing some heartbreak is a good diet for men but not for women.
See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.
Dear friends,
For many of us, email is a source of joy and stress – we learn a lot from it, but we also never seem to be able to keep up with our inboxes. And in today’s world, it’s likely that we’ll be using email more and more. A project I’m working on right now is to try to better understand how we work with email, with the hope of figuring out what is broken and what we can do about it.
My first step is to research how we currently use email. If you’d like to help me by completing a 5-minute survey, please contact me at dan.ariely@gmail.com. Survey participants will not only receive my gratitude, but will also be entered for a chance to win any of my books, a 30-minute chat with me, or $500.
Irrationally yours,
Dan
Dear Dan,
I’m a physician, and it seems to me that people often stay in the hospital for too long. (One piece of evidence: Many more patients get discharged from the hospital on weekends.) Prolonged hospitalizations cost a lot of money and mean that beds aren’t available for people who need them. How can we change this?
—George
Think of three parties involved in decisions about staying an extra day in the hospital: the doctor, the patient and the family. All three would benefit from having patients discharged before the weekend: The doctors have fewer patients to deal with, the patients get to return to their loved ones, and the families can stay home rather than making one more hospital visit. Maybe we should try to make every day in the hospital feel like Friday.
Here’s a more concrete idea: Why not take one channel on the hospital’s internal TV system and dedicate it to people’s bills? The channel could present patients with real-time information about their bill, showing it rising with every meal, treatment and round of medication. It could also show the charges expected over the next 24 hours. My guess is that this change would spur people to leave the hospital much sooner.
Dear Dan,
How can we encourage people to eat less meat? Lots of people consider it cruel to kill animals and identify emotionally with vegetarians but still choose to eat pork, chicken and steak.
—Vered
Sadly, our choices—moral and otherwise—often aren’t the result of what we know but what we feel, and feelings have their quirks. In my field, there is something called the Identifiable Victim Effect, which shows that people can care deeply about a single, specific tragedy (such as the death of one Syrian refugee) yet care little about vast atrocities involving thousands or even millions of people (such as the Syrian crisis).
A similar principle applies to the ways we think about treating (and eating) animals. During a 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K., the authorities had more than 2 million farm animals slaughtered near infected areas. It was tragic for the animals, the farmers and the British economy, but the decision didn’t produce much public complaint—until one day, when newspapers published front-page photos of a cute little calf in Devon that survived the killing. That picture spurred a public outcry against the wholesale slaughter and, according to the Associated Press, may have helped produce “a change of heart by the British government” that ultimately helped end the killing. The abstract concept of slaughtering legions of cows, pig and sheep did nothing, but the adorable face of one calf made people sad and drove them to take action: the Identifiable Victim Effect at work.
So your best bet may be to wait for the ideal opportunity for a pro-vegetarianism campaign, ideally involving one particularly cute animal.
Meanwhile, you could encourage people to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals,” which describes in vivid detail the conditions in which the creatures we consume are forced to live and die. Reading it made it hard for me to even look at a burger without thinking about what happened to the cow that it came from.
Dear Dan,
What’s the best love note one could write?
—Peter
The ideal message would show confidence, deep desire, a capacity for romance and optimism about your shared future. With all these in mind, I’d suggest, “Would you give me the opportunity to sweep you off your feet?”