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.
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Like 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
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 clean my cell phone many times a day but don’t care that much about the cleanliness of my car or my house?
—Sara
I suspect that this is about your ability to reach your end goal. You probably don’t really think you can ever reach your goal of getting your house 100% clean—maybe 80%, tops. The task is just too large, and others in your household can mess the place up faster than you can clean it. But when it comes to your phone, perfect cleanliness is within reach, and this achievable goal spurs you on.
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Dear Dan,
I recently met up with an old friend whom I hadn’t seen for a very long time. I had been eagerly looking forward to our lunch, but I left very disappointed. All she did for more than two hours was complain—mostly about her husband, with some breaks to complain about her kids. It was just negative and depressing. Why do people complain so much? Could she really think this was a good way to spend time with an old friend?
—Andrea
People complain for many reasons, and we should to try to figure out your friend’s. For one thing, misery often does make us closer to one another. Imagine that you meet a friend—and either tell them how annoying traffic was along the way, or give them the same level of detail about how wonderful your drive was and how easy it was to find parking. Under which case would your friend like you more?
Also, when we complain, we often are looking for reassurance—hoping others will tell us that everything is OK and that what we’re experiencing is just part of life.
So your friend might have been looking to reconnect through shared misery. In this case, you should have indulged her efforts to strengthen your bond. But your friend might also have really wanted you to tell her something like, “You think your husband is a schmuck? Let me tell you about my prize”—thereby assuring her that her life is actually more normal than she might think.
Either way, complaining can actually be pretty useful. The next time a friend starts complaining, go with it.
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Dear Dan,
I travel a lot for work, and I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed with the U.S. way of flying: the waste of time, the disrespect shown to passengers and the lame excuses for delays that the airlines make. Why are we putting ourselves in this horrible situation?
—David
I’m not sure, but here’s what helps me. First, every time I’m stuck on a runway, I try to think about the marvel of flight and remind myself how amazing the technology is. Second, I try to see the experience of travel misery as evidence of our common humanity. Security guards and airline staffers are just as rude and inconsiderate all around the world, suggesting that once you put people in the same situation (in this case, the same tiring, trying and thankless service job), we all turn out to be more or less the same. And as more people travel and see our deep similarity, we will all come this much closer to world peace. Anyway, that’s what I tell myself—and it helps.
See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.
About a year ago we had a course called “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior” on coursera.org
Creating the course was a lot of work, but it was also tremendously rewarding to create a community that was so involved in the exploration of human nature, and how to improve the decisions we all make day to day.
In about 4 weeks (March 11th) version #2 of this course will start. This course will be based on some of the same materials from V1, but it should be an improved version given that in the meanwhile we learned a lot about the nature of online courses.
So, if you are interested, or know someone else who might be interested please pass along this link: https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon
Looking forward to another exciting course
Dan