DAN ARIELY

Updates

Help us test a new email app

February 19, 2016 BY danariely

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Dan

A very Happy Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2016 BY danariely

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

Lots of love

Dan

 

 

Ask Ariely: On Experimental Explanations, Procrastination Punishments, and Server Strategies

February 6, 2016 BY Dan Ariely

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,

For some time now, I’ve been proposing different experiments at my company—experiments with the prices we charge, what we pay employees and the way we treat customers who call to complain. But the experimental approach that seems so successful for science bumps into substantial resistance within my company. Any ideas about how to make experiments more palatable in the business world?

—Darren 

Without knowing exactly why your colleagues are balking at the experimental approach, it is hard to propose a solution. But based on my own corporate experiences, I’ll assume that they are objecting to the idea that some people in your experiments will get better treatment and some will get worse treatment, which just seems unfair.
One of my colleagues at Duke experienced a related challenge recently. He asked a local urban high school if he could offer half the students a free lunch to see how it might influence their attendance and academic performance. In the spirit of experimentation, he wanted to randomly select which pupils would get the free lunch and which ones wouldn’t. The school found the suggestion repugnant: It seemed offensive to select some kids and not others.
My colleague waited a few months and tried again. This time, he told the school administrators that he wanted to give all the students the free lunch but could only afford to pay for half of them—and asked the school how to decide who would get the free lunch. And what was their suggestion? You guessed it: to pick the kids randomly. As this story illustrates, equity is a major obstacle to executing experiments. But if you can figure out how to frame them as fair, they might become more palatable.

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Dear Dan,

I’m a philosophy professor, teaching metaphysics and philosophy of language. What’s the best policy for penalizing students who hand in coursework late, with an eye on preparing them for the world of work?

—Andrew 

If the goal is to prepare students for life, I would start by creating a penalty system with a continuously increasing punishment—say, cutting their total grade by 3% for every day of delay. This largely resembles the penalties that adult life imposes: Even for things with very clear deadlines, like taxes, you can be late—but there’s a penalty for doing so, and the longer you wait, the larger it becomes.
Since you’re interested in helping your students more generally, you could also help them learn how to better plan their time. Students procrastinate, routinely and repeatedly, and they rarely seem to conquer this pattern. You could take a more active role in helping them create virtuous habits of planning and time management, perhaps by helping them break down daunting tasks into manageable sub-tasks and showing them how to schedule these in their calendars. Such ploys won’t teach them philosophy, but by dedicating some class time to such things, you might teach your students some important life lessons—and free up more time for them to read Aristotle and Wittgenstein.

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Dear Dan,

I’m a server in a New York City restaurant in New York, and I want diners to trust my recommendations and leave me larger tips. Any advice?

—Robert 

As soon as you hand them the menu, tell them that you strongly recommend they avoid the branzino special (or any other very expensive dish). By demonstrating that you’re willing to steer them away from a pricey entrée, they’re more likely to think that you truly care about them, trust your advice and tip you more.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

 

Ask Ariely: Surge Charges, Moving Costs, and Expiration Dates

January 23, 2016 BY Dan Ariely

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 use Uber more and more these days, but I feel bad about using it when they slap on surge pricing rates, as they seem increasingly prone to do. Even with the surge rates, Uber is often cheaper than taxis—so why the mixed emotions?

—Wendy 

Your question contrasts two sides of pricing: supply and demand, on the one hand, and fairness, on the other. Surge prices occur when users’ demand for rides outstrips the supply that existing drivers can provide—at which point Uber adds a multiplier to each fare to encourage more drivers to work and, simultaneously, to discourage more frugal passengers from asking for rides.
From an economic perspective, surge pricing is a beautiful, two-front solution to this supply/demand mismatch. But it still feels unfair: When you take an Uber at the regular rate to start your evening and are suddenly told that the trip home will be three times more expensive, you feel blackmailed.
To think about the fairness issue, imagine that you’re very thirsty. The only lemonade stand in the area knows this and charges you three times as much for a glass. Something not too different took place some years ago in Brazil: On hot days, Coca-Cola decided to increase the prices in their vending machines. People hated it, much as you find yourself reacting to Uber’s surge rates.
This fairness question is central to Uber’s business model. For its long-term sustainability, it needs to handle the problem in a way that doesn’t feel unfair. Perhaps a loyalty program?

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Dear Dan,

My partner and I make a reasonable income, and we’ve been able to save some money over the years. We can afford to move to a more expensive neighborhood, but we aren’t sure if this is the right way to spend our money. What do you say?

—Paul 

I’d be cautious about moving to a pricier area. We tend to compare ourselves with our surroundings, and our happiness stems directly from those comparisons. If the people around us drive Hondas, we feel good in a Honda; if those around us drive Audis, our old Honda will make us cringe.
Moreover, we quickly become accustomed to the fancy new car and derive less excitement and fun from it. This phenomenon is called the “hedonic treadmill”: We continuously chase prestige, thinking it will make us lastingly happy, but we rather quickly revert to our pre-purchase level of happiness.
So you should be careful when trying to figure out the benefits of moving. Right now, you’re probably overestimating the value of a move; six months afterward, its value is likely to seem lower. As a practical shortcut for all this, you could assume that the value of moving is only half of what it seems right now—and ask if you’d still move. If the answer is still yes, go for it; if it is no, stay put, and look for other ways to spend your money.

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Dear Dan,

What’s the best way to improve the quality of marriages?

—Maayan 

The No. 1 enemy of relationships is being taken for granted. So I would set up marriages to expire automatically every five years and be renewable only if both parties opt in for another five-year period. Sure, this setup would mean that more people separate (you asked about the quality of marriages, not their longevity). But spouses would have to think more carefully about their partners, take them less for granted and thereby strengthen their relationships.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Join us for better health

January 19, 2016 BY danariely

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

 

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

Ask Ariely: On Mint Deficit, Beverage Behavior, and Focused Feelings

January 9, 2016 BY Dan Ariely

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,

Is it more important to floss or to brush?

—Ting 

It’s a tricky question. In terms of dental health, my understanding is that flossing is much more important than brushing—so if you had to pick one of the two, flossing should be your choice.

But we also need to consider which of these activities people are more likely to do. Here the answer is undoubtedly brushing. So even though flossing does more good for your mouth, brushing is what people are more likely to perform routinely, which makes it more important from a practical perspective.

The underlying issue is why we are so much more likely to brush than to floss. If we thought about our long-term well-being, we would floss regularly, but in dental care as in many other human endeavors, we often don’t act in ways that serve our enlightened self-interest. (We eat too much, save too little and so on.)

So why do we like to brush? In large part because the toothpaste industry has cunningly convinced us that to be socially acceptable, we must be minty fresh. Preoccupied as we are with our social standing, we wake up, feel the mint deficit in our mouths and immediately brush.

In essence, this is a case of “reward substitution.” The basic idea is that some actions just aren’t sufficiently motivating by themselves, so we create rewards for them that aren’t necessarily relevant but still get us to do what we’re supposed to.

Most of us brush not because we want to make sure that we have gleaming, healthy teeth in five, 10 or 30 years; we brush because we feel a socially driven need for that minty feeling right now. Brushing is really a delivery vehicle for mint. That is another reason we don’t floss: By the time we’re done brushing, we’ve got all the mint we need, and the hint of mint on the floss doesn’t add to our minty-ness.

So is flossing or brushing more important? I’d vote for brushing. It isn’t ideal, and we’re not doing it for the right reason, but at least we’re doing it.

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Dear Dan,

How can I make myself wake up earlier? No matter how much I sleep at night, I can’t motivate myself to get out of bed on time. I just lie there and ignore any plans for my morning. Help!

—Diego 

This is another case where reward substitution can play a role, because you need a different incentive that is more motivating. How about promising yourself that if you get up at the right time, you’ll get a cup of fantastic coffee, but if you oversleep, you’ll only allow yourself to have terrible instant coffee—or even prune juice? You could draft your significant other to be the controller so you can’t cheat on your little pledge.

Remember, reward substitution bypasses our natural inclinations (lounging in bed) by getting us to do the right thing (waking up on time) for the wrong reason (for love of fine coffee and/or hatred of prune juice). It’s a handy recipe for better behavior in many areas of life.

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Dear Dan,

My husband and I love each other deeply, but when we get home at night, we usually wind up on our computers until it is time for bed. How can we make ourselves have more romantic evenings?

—Helen 

Try having an eye exam with pupil dilation just before going home. For a few hours, you won’t be able to work or see anything clearly—and you will be forced to focus on your spouse. If this approach works, maybe you can simulate pupil dilation by promising to put on glasses with the wrong prescription as soon as you walk into the house.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

New Years Priorities

January 1, 2016 BY Dan Ariely

Dear Dan,

What is your New Year resolution for 2016?

—Catherine 

Setting up priorities. I get a lot of requests for all kinds of time-consuming activities very day. In general I try to be helpful, but there are only 24 hours of the day and I already don’t sleep much. So, in reality every time I say yes to something I also say no to other things – and my sad realization is that my process for saying yes and no does not lead to a plate of activities that fits with my priorities. So, in 2016 I am going to try and figure out what my priorities are, and then direct my time in a consistent way with my priorities. Now, I do realize that this experiment will ultimately fail, but I will at least give it a try. 

Ask Ariely: On Bargain Glow, Mindless Savings, and Rigid Resolutions

December 26, 2015 BY Dan Ariely

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,

Why do I feel so good when I buy something that is on discount—or, better yet, on sale?

—Sarah 

Happiness is often a relative judgment about the distance between where we are and where we could have been. If we think that something could have been better, we feel bad, and if we think that something could have been worse, we feel good by comparison. So when we buy something at a great discount, it is easy to compare our situation to the alternative scenario of paying full price—and we feel fantastic.
The problem, of course, is that this type of relative comparison and its attendant happiness don’t linger in our minds. Once we start using our bargain purchase, we don’t think much about its price, so the relative happiness from the discount disappears.
To keep that bargain glow, you could remind yourself of the pittance you paid and the full price that you dodged, or you could realize that the joy of buying goods on sale has a short shelf life.

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Dear Dan,

As 2015 comes to an end, I want to start saving for my retirement more seriously. Could any tricks help me to move the saving needle?

—Teo 

Usually, saving is what we have left over after we finish spending—and because life is full of temptations, we often spend more and save less. One of the best responses is to eliminate the temptation to overspend.
Think of your 401(k). In a world in which people always make the best decisions, we’d sit down at the end of the month with our bank statement, see how much cash we have left and put as much as possible in a long-term savings account. In the real world, we’d probably save even less than we do now. So 401(k) plans take the money right out of our salaries, forcing us to manage with the leftovers. That isn’t ideal, but at least it gets us to save something.
For another example of the power of mindless savings, look to the realm of personal finance: The key to growing your money turns out to be putting it in a decent fund and forgetting about it. A Fidelity Investments study showed that the best long-term savers are people who forgot that they had a savings account. (Dead people with saving accounts have even better stamina.)
My recommendation: Try to think once about savings—the start of the year is a fine time for this—and set up automatic transfers that will serve you in the long term.

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Dear Dan,

What kinds of New Year’s resolutions are we most likely to keep?

—Elizabeth 

Probably vows like, “Drink more and better wine.” More seriously, the resolutions that are most likely to work guard us from feeling like failures. When we set up a rigid goal and miss, we are likely to tell ourselves, “I failed, so what the hell—now I can go wild.” On the other hand, when a single failure is just a minor disappointment rather than a badge of shame, we can dig in and keep trying. So this year, plan your resolutions with some appreciation of the likelihood that you’ll occasionally fall short.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Ask Ariely: Strategic Seating, Rush Hour Rudeness, and Loose Lips

December 12, 2015 BY Dan Ariely

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

My fiancé and I are realizing that we’re going to have to invite some awful people to our wedding. These are close relatives whom we love despite everything, but they often say or do crummy things at parties. We estimate that they’ll make up about 4% of our guests at a 150-person wedding. 

So how should we arrange the table seating for maximum guest happiness? Should we put all of the troublemakers together, spread them among other guests who don’t know them well or put them with family members who are more or less used to their behavior?

—Susanna 

First, congratulations. If you apply this kind of forward planning to your life together, you might beat the divorce statistics.

As to your question, we know that people get a sense of what’s socially acceptable from the people around them. If you put all the troublemakers at one table, they’ll build off each other, take each other’s actions as signals of what’s acceptable and create a tremendous ruckus that will far exceed their actual size at the wedding. So I’d recommend that you split them up and seat them next to some stern grandmother to keep them in check.

Here’s a riskier suggestion: Put them at the kids table. Thinking about children often makes us become more idealistic and try to be the best version of ourselves. And if they still misbehave, the kids will get a good, memorable experience.

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Dear Dan,

Every day on the New York City subway, I encounter a plethora of commuters traveling with additional bags, taking up extra space at rush hour and making the trip worse for everyone. Why are they behaving so irrationally?

—Lenny 

The behavior isn’t really irrational from the standpoint of the people with the extra bags, but it is certainly suboptimal for the commuter community as a whole. This type of behavior falls under the heading of what we call “the tragedy of the commons,” derived from a scenario in which several farmers have one cow apiece, with a patch of grass (the commons) that serves everyone. One day, one farmer gets a second cow. Now the cows eat the grass at a rate slightly faster than its replenishing rate. Eventually, there isn’t enough grass for any of the cows; malnourishment sets in, and milk production drops.

The same process could be unfolding on the subway, which would function far better if everybody would take just one bag. Taking multiple bags may suit those carrying them, but it hurts the group and the commuting exercise as a whole.

This analysis won’t help your problem, but maybe you could start looking at it with some deeper appreciation for the complexity of social dilemmas.

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Dear Dan,

Recently, a friend told me a secret that belongs to a third friend. She even added that the third friend had explicitly asked her not to share it with anyone. Why did she tell me? Doesn’t she realize that I will trust her less now?

—Evelyn 

Your loose-lipped friend has demonstrated that she is the secret-sharing type, but she has also showed that she cares enough about you to betray her promise to the third friend for your supposed benefit. If I was being puckish, I’d say you should trust her more.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Ask Ariely: Boss Behavior, Communal Correspondence, and Long-Term Love

November 28, 2015 BY Dan Ariely

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 having ongoing problems with my boss because of his leadership style: He is very rigid and formal, and he demands silent obedience from his workers. Should I rebel, recognize his authority or look for a new job?

—Ajaan 

This is really a question about the likelihood that your boss’s behavior can change. While I would like to be optimistic about the chances here, it is pretty difficult to get people to change in general—and it’s particularly difficult to be optimistic in your case.

Imagine a world in which you were the only person working for your boss. If you rebelled, that would immediately redefine the work environment, and your boss would be quite likely to adapt and change. By contrast, if your company has hundreds of employees, even an outright personal rebellion would make up only a small part of the feedback going up to your boss, leaving him unlikely to learn and change.

As such, if you think that you can get all of your fellow employees to start demanding better treatment, then you should try rebellion—but if you can’t get at least a critical mass of allies on board, move on.

One final point: Feeling in control and having some sense of autonomy are incredibly important aspects of fulfilling work. Any job that doesn’t give you these elements is going to chip away at your well-being and happiness. So when you look for your next gig, make sure that you get a job that gives you more than just a paycheck.

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Dear Dan,

My wife and I have one email address for the two of us. Buddies from my soccer team often joke about our shared email address, calling me a sissy. Are they right? Should I convince my wife to get a separate email?

—Franz 

No—don’t change. I suspect that the notion that everybody should have their own email account emerged a long time ago when email was in its infancy—when we didn’t really know how we should be using it, let alone how it would grow and evolve. Over the years, email has become a vital, rich communications tool, but the notion of one email per person has remained our mental default setting—probably to the detriment of good communication.

You may have heard of an interesting new tech firm called Slack, which offers software to help groups of colleagues trade messages and share files. It could be, the Journal says, “the fastest-growing business application of all time”—and it is specifically designed to create shared communication between people in a manner similar to your shared-email approach. Slack’s popularity among high-tech companies suggests that you’re onto something.

I would tell your teammates that, rather than thoughtlessly accepting a default email habit, you’re ahead of your time—and that one day, they will catch up.

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Dear Dan,

I’m dating a wonderful guy, but I wonder: What’s the thing that’s most likely to solidify our bond and turn it into a successful long-term relationship?

—Logan 

The best advice I can give about long-term couplehood is to find someone you admire and aspire to emulate in some important ways—and have them simultaneously feel the same way about you. With this starting point, you can spend the rest of your joint lives striving to improve and catch up. I’ve adopted this advice myself and can personally attest to how magical it can make one’s life.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

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