It is my greatest pleasure to announce a documentary that I have been working on with Yael Melamede of Salty Features.
Today, we launch a Kickstarter campaign that will help us finish the film and build its presence in the world.
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Please visit our Kickstarter Page to learn more about (Dis)Honesty and to become part of this special project.
Then, share the project with all your family members, closest friends, acquaintances, the cashier at your local grocery store, that guy you bumped into on the way to work, the lady whose wallet you found on the street and returned…everyone!
Thank you for your support, and I look forward to working with you along the way.
(Dis)honestly Yours,
Dan Ariely
P.S. Like The Dishonesty Project on Facebook!
And follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dishonestyproj
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Cross-cultural research is becoming increasingly popular, but many researchers are failing to understand the unique challenges it poses. Cross cultural psychology explores how culture influences behavior and attitudes, and cultural psychologists aim to study subjects from two or more cultures using equivalent methods of measurements (Triandis & Brislin, 1984).
This research can often be difficult to conduct, and as someone in the midst of working through these problems in our lab, I’ve noticed some of these difficulties. I’m sharing what I’ve learned here as a quick guide to both help other researchers design better studies and help readers know enough background to better evaluate this research.
Five Challenges of Cross Cultural Research
1. Design:
The research question and design should be very clear before embarking on cross-cultural research. And when I say clear, I mean crystal clear. What are the specific hypotheses? What analysis will you run? Do you have variables that will allow you to run those tests? Do you have proper controls?
Always start with a pilot study with at least one of the target cultures (or a population in your home country), because it’s surprising how many things sometimes just don’t work. For instance, when conducting survey research, it’s important to test your constructs, such as sub-scales. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars and months working on a project, make sure your scales work with your population, and don’t just assume it’ll work based on past research.
2. Translations:
How can you express the exact same idea in several languages? Or in the same language but to different cultural populations, such as British vs. American, or urban vs. rural? Again, pilot testing is key. Don’t just show it to a few research assistants who speak the language, get it out to the people that you’ll be studying.
How should you actually translate? We recommend the forward-backward method, where the translated document is translated back to the original language for comparison.
3. Consistency:
As a cross-cultural researcher, you must standardize processes, settings, and other factors of your research so that the only difference between your samples is their culture. Prepare documents like protocols and scripts for experimenters, and go over them again and again. Different cultures have different customs and social behaviors, and those social behaviors, even if they’re as small as how to administer a survey in a coffee shop, cannot vary across studies without jeopardizing the data. This is problematic when you have just one culture, one survey, and one research assistant. When you have ten cultures, one survey in different languages, and many research assistants across the globe, things can get very messy, fast. Remember though, if things are messy, then it’s important to be honest about it in the write up. In the modern age of ‘imperfect’ data, reviewers are looking for and respectful of honesty.
4. Cultural Customs:
Try to have a local person or team who is willing to be involved in the implementation of the project; they will contribute greatly with local advice and organization.
There will be many local factors that you won’t be aware of if you’re not familiar with the culture. For example, you may not know where to collect data, how to deal with local businesses while asking permission, or even how to approach subjects in a nice and professional way. Things like these may vary across countries, and locals are the only ones who can fill you in. It’s also important to understand all these differences before collecting data. For instance, a methodology might work well in one cultural but, because of social norms, not in another. Again, pilot test and know as much as you can ahead of time.
5. Paying Participants:
Does your study involve paying participants? If so, make sure to adjust that payment considering the cost of living of each country. Remember $1 in the USA is not the same as $1 in other countries, so you must make payments equivalent! We recommend indexes like the Purchasing Power Parity Index (World Bank) or the Big Mac Index (The Economist). Also consider whether your samples are used to being paid to do experiments and if your payment varies from this normal payment model.
In the end, the most important thing to remember with cross-cultural psychology is to plan ahead. When evaluating cross-cultural research in journals or news articles, the critical reader should consider what factors the researchers might have overlooked.
One final consideration is to remember that all research is only part of the puzzle. There is no definitive cross-cultural psychological paper, and there never will be. So it’s important to keep each finding in perspective.
~Ximena Garcia-Rada~
Further readings about cross-cultural psychology:
– Keith, K. Cross-Cultural Psychology: Contemporary Themes and Perspectives.
– Shiraev, E. B. & Levy, D. A. (2010). Cross-cultural psychology: critical thinking and contemporary applications (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson/Allyn Bacon.
– Triandis, H. C., & Brislin, R. W. (1984). Cross-cultural psychology. American Psychologist, 39(9), 1006-1016. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.39.9.1006
– Hofstede, G., Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations
Behavioral economics is the study of humans and their (occasionally irrational) interactions with the world. Starting on March 11th, I will teach “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” a glance at the peculiar mechanics of the mind. Join me for the most riveting 8 weeks of your life, and you never know — you may just end up the next CEO of the world.
Sign up 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 was recently stuck overnight in a strange city due to a canceled flight. Because the airline blamed the cancellation on “weather,” no one helped me find a place to stay or pay for it. Meanwhile, I saw other flights leaving the same airport. Is “weather” just a term airlines use when they try to consolidate flights, not compensate their customers and avoid blame?
—Kelly
I am sure that sometimes the weather really is at fault, but I have no idea whether the airlines use the weather excuse promiscuously when it’s to their financial advantage. It would be difficult to make such a judgment call (should we call the reason for the delay the weather or technical issues?) while completely ignoring the economic incentives involved. And blaming all kinds of things on the weather is a very useful strategy for the airlines because trapped fliers don’t directly blame the airlines for it.
But let’s be honest here: Many of us also sometimes blame our own tardiness on traffic or the weather. And I suspect many of us would blame the weather even more frequently for all sorts of lapses if we just had the opportunity.
To my mind, the weather excuse (as the airlines use it) has one major problem. The airlines’ logic is that bad weather is an act of God, which releases the airline from responsibility. But isn’t the airlines’ behavior probably the reason God is angry to begin with?
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Dear Dan,
How can I enjoy life more? Every year, time seems to go by faster; months rush by, and years just seem to disappear. Is there a reason for this, or is the memory of time passing more slowly when we were children just an illusion?
—Gal
Time does go by (or, more accurately, it feels as if time is going by) more quickly the older we get. In the first few years of our lives, anything we sense or do is brand-new, and a lot of our experiences are unique, so they remain firmly in our memories. But as the years go by, we encounter fewer and fewer new experiences—both because we have already accomplished a lot and because we become slaves to our daily routines. For example, try to remember what happened to you every day last week. Chances are that nothing extraordinary happened, so you will be hard-pressed to recall the specific things you did on Monday, Tuesday etc.
What can we do about this? Maybe we need some new app that will encourage us to try out new experiences, point out things we’ve never done, recommend dishes we’ve never tasted and suggest places we’ve never been. Such an app could make our lives more varied, prod us to try new things, slow down the passage of time and increase our happiness. Until such an app arrives, try to do at least one new thing every week.
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Dear Dan,
My daughter recently persuaded me to start eating two cloves of garlic every day. I feel more energetic and less stressed. Is it the garlic, or is it a placebo?
—Yoram
I am not sure, but have you considered the possibility that the reason you feel so much better is that people are now leaving you alone?
See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.
You make decisions all the time. What should you eat for breakfast? Which route should you take to work? How much are you willing to pay for local, pasture-raised beef over factory farmed, corn-fed meat? Should you go for a run, jog, walk, or finish watching the last season of Breaking Bad?
Some of these decisions might be great, while others … not so much. For example, take the mind-boggling case of someone winning a chess championship one minute and texting while driving the next. Playing chess (competently, at least) requires thinking many steps ahead, considering multiple scenarios and outcomes — whereas texting while driving is a complete and utter failure of the same kind of forward-thinking. The gap between how amazing we are in some respects and completely inept in others just highlights the invaluable nature of studying how humans think and interact with the world.
So, when do we make good decisions, and when and why do we fail? Fortunately, behavioral economics does have some answers. In “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” you will learn about some of the many ways in which we behave in less than rational ways, and how we might overcome some of our shortcomings. You’ll also find cases where our irrationalities work in our favor, and how we can harness these tendencies to make better decisions.
You will explore topics such as our “irrational” patterns of thinking about money and investments, how expectations shape perception, economic and psychological analyses of dishonesty by honest people, how social and financial incentives work together (or against each other) in labor, how self-control comes into play with decision making, and how emotion (rather than cognition) can have a large impact on economic decisions.
All of this, packed into just 8 weeks! Join our modern crusade to improve decision making, and hopefully learn some things on the way. Sign up now (class starts on March 11th): https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon
Irrationally Yours,
Dan Ariely
We often get asked what it’s like to work in the Center for Advanced Hindsight. So, we thought we’d give you a peek into our daily lives with our new series called “Working With Advanced Hindsight.” To see more about the nature of our lab, check out the photos and content on our Facebook page.
To begin our series, let’s start with the youngest people in the lab: our wonderful undergraduate research assistants. The lab takes on a few undergraduate students as research assistants each semester, and their responsibilities cover a wide range — from doing background research for new studies to running the actual experiments. To better understand what working at CAH as a research assistant is like, we’ve asked five of our current research assistants a few questions.
Q. Why did you join the lab?
Katie: “I applied because the research was awesome. But I joined because at my interview it was made clear that if I put in the effort, I would really be part of the research experience and that I would be part of creating and carrying out ideas. Today I know that some of the words and graphics I came up with to study a brainstorming session at the age of 19 will be in an academic journal article one day. It’s an amazing way to start off freshman year.”
Tyler: “Before I learned about the study of behavioral economics, I had never realized that economics was applicable to things other than business. Suddenly, I was able to understand things from what beer people will order in a restaurant to how people derive happiness from work. I wanted to be more involved with and surrounded by these ideas.”
Q. What is it like to work at the lab?
Shannon: “You oftentimes hear academics talk about their research and publications as if they are the only ones working on a project. But at the CAH lab, I’ve learned the importance of collaboration and cooperation. We edit each other’s surveys, help each other’s experiments, and collectively work together as a team.”
Minn Htet: “I see myself as a generalist. The great thing about CAH is that it is truly interdisciplinary and the work we do here is connected to many different things across disciplines. From historians to neuroscientists, CAH is a crossroads of ideas.”
Michael: “Working at CAH brings an interesting dichotomy of intensive yet fun research to each day. It’s fun and frustrating. And I am not just saying that, sometimes everything is just frustration — that’s science.”
Q. What is challenging about being a RA at the lab?
Katie: “Creating a good experiment can be challenging. For instance you may want to make people “feel calm” in the lab. Not only does one have to consider how to create “calm”, the researcher also has to worry about how to measure it and how differently people react to stimuli intended to induce “calmness.”
Minn Htet: “Research is not just about developing a knowledge set, it’s about learning how to ask and answer questions. And answering questions is hard, isolating constructs and truly producing new knowledge is really tricky.”
Tyler: “I had never realized that there were so many variables that needed to be controlled for and that oftentimes an idea needs to be tested in a variety of different ways in order to fully assess whether it is the ‘explanatory variable’ that is causing a certain outcome.”
Q. What have you learnt?
Katie: “It sounds cheesy, but research doesn’t just mean sitting in a lab running numbers or counting cells. Research also requires creativity and innovation. Ideas are important. Also, as in any aspect of life, the ability to write well is necessary.”
Shannon: “Being a researcher can be immensely diverse– from running a study at a downtown restaurant, to working alone for hours on a tedious survey, to having animated discussions about what to write for a popular press article, I have discovered that there are a lot of different facets to this type of life, even as an RA.”
Michael: “I’ve realized maintaining enthusiasm in the face opposition is paramount to good research. “
A few times a month, I buy a bag of coffee at the supermarket on my street. I enjoy the ritual of standing before the twenty or thirty whole-bean options in the coffee aisle, imagining how the different roasts and origins might taste. This past Sunday, though, I was surprised to see how my coffee choice influenced the actions of a stranger.
I noticed another shopper in the coffee aisle, engrossed in selecting the perfect coffee for the week. Even after I had paused, nabbed a promising-looking bag, and walked off, she was still weighing her options. I don’t blame her – coffee is very important.
As I got ready to leave the store, I almost laughed when I saw her at the register. After all her cost-benefit analysis back in the aisle, she’d selected the exact same coffee that I had! The odds of us choosing the same coffee at random, considering the aisle of options, was pretty low. Instead, it seemed like my coffee choice might have signaled to her that this specific roast was more delicious and well-liked than the others. I could have influenced her choice without even speaking a word.
Although I thought this was funny at the time, I can’t say that I would’ve done differently if I had been in her place. We call this effect “herding,” and it occurs when we act based on how those around us behave. When searching for a place to eat downtown, you might see a long line out the door of a restaurant and think, “That place must be good if everyone else is standing in line, I better check it out.”
Sometimes restaurants really are just more popular because they’re higher quality, but it’s easy to see how it can become a problem. I’m not the world’s greatest coffee expert, so if I ended up leading herds of people at my local grocery store, the other customers might not be better off.
Of course getting worse coffee isn’t the biggest mistake you can make while shopping. Herding can lead to bigger problems in other cases, though (think the stock market), and it’s worth looking out for. I don’t have as academic a background as some of the researchers in the lab, but working here has taught me more about these biases, and it’s been fun to notice these mistakes in day-to-day life.
~M.R. Trower~
What’s the best way to help low-income families improve their financial lives? One approach is “microsavings,” which are small deposit accounts that can be an incentive to save more for future goals. Research shows that these small, long-term accounts not only build assets but also promote the social and intellectual development of low-income children. In this podcast, I talk with Professor Michael Sherraden of Washington University in St. Louis about another concept of savings accounts called Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), and their potential impact on poverty in the U.S.
Listen to the podcast here.
Six years ago, an orange-and-blue book was first set free into the world. It was the beginning of an amazing journey — not only for the book, but also for me. This book traveled to all parts of the world, translated into ~40 different languages, and I traveled with it. To this day, I still find myself in the far regions of the earth, meeting new people, having interesting conversations, and understanding the world in a different way.
As I reflect today on these last six years, what is amazing to me is the degree to which this book was a starting point for the rest of my life. And the journey continues.
Happy Anniversary,
Dan