Dan Ariely's Blog, page 48

A talk at the Regulator

Tomorrow, Friday, at 7 PM I will talk about The Honest Truth at the Regulator bookstore in Durham NC.

This is the list of songs that they have created to play in the store the whole day.  I am just wondering if these songs will make the people in the store (employees and customers) more dishonest compare with a regular day…..

A live book talk on Monday

I am pleased to announce that I will be hosting a live book talk on Shindig (http://www.shindigevents.com/) , a new customized video chat space for live events. We will be connected globally via webcam online, and can interact and participate in a live talk about Honesty and Dishonesty. You can socialize with other participants, or watch and listen. The event will be on Monday July 2nd at 6pm EST.

Here’s how it works. About 15 minutes before it starts, go to this link and log in (http://www.shindig.com/event/dan-ariely). You should test your microphone and camera at this time. Then when the event starts we can get going. We will have an interactive talk about irrationality, honesty and dishonesty, followed by a question and answer session.

The only way to make this interesting and fun is to have people in attendance. So please invite as many of your friends as you like to join us! Spread the word on Facebook and Twitter to as many people as you can.

Honestly* yours

Dan Ariely

a live book talk on Monday

I am pleased to announce that I will be hosting a live book talk on Shindig (http://www.shindigevents.com/) , a new customized video chat space for live events. We will be connected globally via webcam online, and can interact and participate in a live talk about Honesty and Dishonesty. You can socialize with other participants, or watch and listen. The event will be on Monday July 2nd at 6pm EST.

Here’s how it works. About 15 minutes before it starts go to this link and log in (http://www.shindig.com/event/dan-ariely). You should test your microphone and camera at this time. Then when the event starts we can get underway. We will have an interactive talk about Irrationality, honesty and dishonesty, followed by a question and answer session.

The way to make this interesting and fun is to have people in attendance. So please invite as many of your friends as you like to join us! Spread the word on Facebook and Twitter to as many people as you can.

 

Honestly* yours

 

Dan Ariely

Advice Column

Starting next week, the doctor is in! I’m teaming up with The Wall Street Journal to offer answers to readers’ questions sent to IdeasMarket@wsj.com. Whether it’s about family matters, work conundrums, in-law issues, or where to take your next vacation, I’m happy to have the chance to let you sprawl out on my e-coach and provide some (hopefully useful) advice. And it won’t cost you a dime. Or a nickel.

A Dinner with Drug Reps

Over the years I’ve written all sorts of blog posts on dishonesty, and because the new book release, I want to repost an updated version of them to accompany. For the next few days I’ll post one every other day. Enjoy!

Janet Schwartz of Tulane University and I once spent an evening with a few former pharmaceutical reps, men who used to be in the business of selling a wide range of drugs to treat all kinds of diseases and conditions, from fibromyalgia to depression to restless leg syndrome. As drug representatives, they would go from doctor to doctor attempting to convince physicians to prescribe their company’s drugs. How? Typically they would start by passing on informative pamphlets and giving out products like pens, clipboards, and notepads advertising their drugs.

But we knew there was more to the story, so we tried the pharmaceutical reps at their own game – we took them to a nice dinner and kept the wine flowing. Once we got them a bit sauced, they were ready to tell all. And what we learned was fairly shocking.

Picture these guys: attractive, charming young men. Not the kind of guys who would have trouble finding a date. One of them told us a story about how he was once trying to persuade a reluctant female physician to attend a seminar about a medication he was promoting. After a bit of persuading, she finally decided to attend – but only after he agreed to escort her to a ballroom dancing class. This, according to our new friends, was a typical kind of quid pro quo where the rep does a personal favor for the doctor and the doctor promotes the rep’s product in return.

Another common practice was to bring meals to the doctor’s office (one of the perks of being a receptionist), and one office even required alternating days of steak or lobster for lunch in exchange for access to the (well-fed) doctors.

Even more shocking was that when the reps were in the physician’s office, they were sometimes called into the examination room (as “experts”) to inform the patients about the drug directly. And the device reps experienced a surprisingly intimate level of involvement in patient care, often selling medical devices in the operating room, while the surgery was going on.

Aside from learning about their profession, we also realized how well these pharmaceutical reps understood classic psychological persuasion strategies, and how they employed them in a sophisticated and intuitive manner. One clever tactic they used was to hire physicians to give a brief lecture to other physicians about a drug. Now, they really didn’t care what the audience took from the lecture, but were actually interested in what the act of giving the lecture did to the speaker himself. They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that people quickly start believing whatever comes out of their own mouths, even when they are paid to say it. This is a clear case of cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are touting this drug, they must believe in it themselves — and so their beliefs alter to align with their speech.

The reps employed other tricks like switching on and off various accents, personalities, political affiliations, and basically served as persuasion machines (they may have mentioned the word “chameleon”). They were great at putting doctors at ease, relating to them as similar working people who go deep-sea fishing or play baseball together. They used these shared experiences to develop an understanding that the physicians write prescriptions for their “friends.”  The physicians, of course, did not think that they were compromising their values when they were out shooting the breeze with the drug reps.

I was recently at a conference for the American Medical Association, where I gave a lecture about conflicts of interest.  Interestingly, the lecture just before me was by a representative from a device company that created brain implants.  In his lecture he made the case for selling devices in the operating room because doctors could need help learning how to use the device. And in order to fight conflicts of interest, the company no longer takes physicians to Hawaii for their annual conferences — and instead they have their conference in Wisconsin.

So, what do we do?  First, we must realize that doctors have conflicts of interest.  With this understanding we need to place barriers that prevent this kind of schmoozing, and to keep reps from undue access to physicians or patients. They, of course, have the right to send doctors information, but their interactions should stop there.

I have one more idea: What if we only allow people to be drug reps if they are over 75 and unattractive? Not only would these individuals have more personal experience with the healthcare system, it also could reduce conflicts of interest and open up job opportunities to an undervalued population.

Events: StartupOnomics and Open Mic

I’m excited to announce two upcoming events in August in sunny Palo Alto. One is called StartupOnomics, which is a summit for people involved in start up companies seeking to make the world better, whether it’s through preserving earth, health, youth, or money (August 24-25). This summit will help you, prospective world-savers, understand how people make decisions so that whatever product or service you’re working on can make an impact.

The summit comprises two days of interactive sessions, work sessions, and lectures with experts in behavioral economics (August 24 and 25).  It will be a veritable smorgasbord of events designed to help people think and plan all aspects of their start up.

The other event is an open mic night with me on the evening of August 23. This is separate and open to anyone who reserves a spot. I’ll make a brief presentation and then open the floor for any questions from the audience.

We’ll need your application by July 15th, so hurry! And I look forward to meeting all of you who join us. Reserve your spot for the open mic night as soon as possible!

In Praise of Dishonesty

It was gratifying when I recently received some unexpected praise for the new book. If you’re having doubts about whether to read it, maybe this will help you decide…

“I’ve been handing out copies to everyone I know!”

-       Robin Hood

 

“The world is full of small cheaters, but what separates those amateurs from us pros is dedication and effort. Understanding dishonesty has made us not only more efficient, but it also kept us out of jail.”

-       Everyone responsible for the 2008 financial crisis

 

“In The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely shows that our ability to cheat is based on our ability to make ourselves feel good about lying. As a master of this skill, I can personally attest to his insights and findings. I feel great!”

-       Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo (“Charles”) Ponzi, (1882 –1949), inventor of the Ponzi scheme

 

“A princely read!”

-       Nicolo Machiavelli

 

“There’s a sucker born every minute, and Ariely teaches us that we’re likely to be one as well.”

-       Phineas Taylor Barnum (“P.T.”) Barnum, businessman, scam artist and entertainer

Religion and Research

Direct my steps by Your word, and let no iniquity have dominion over me.

 

Redeem me from the oppression of man, that I may keep Your precepts.

Make Your face shine upon Your servant, and teach me Your statutes.

Rivers of water run down from my eyes, because men do no keep Your law.

-Psalm 119: 133-136

 

If you read Predictably Irrational, you may recall that we carried out a study on cheating that assessed the value of moral reminders. In the experiment, we asked participants to complete a test, told them they’d receive cash for every correct answer, and made sure they knew they had ample room to cheat. Now here’s the kicker: prior to starting, we had half the participants list ten books off their high-school reading list, and the other half to recall the Ten Commandments, a manipulation that turned out to have a marked effect on the results: While many in the first group deceitfully reported a higher number of correct answers, no one in the second group cheated.

 

How do we explain the findings? A tempting conclusion to draw would be to equate religiosity with a higher morality; however, this argument doesn’t hold, since in a follow-up study with atheist participants, recalling the Ten Commandments had the exact same effect. Rather, what was at play here was the power of a moral reminder: Prime a person to think about ethics right before they have an opportunity to cheat, and they’ll avoid immoral behavior.

 

This experiment also suggests to me that religion can be a good source of ideas for social science research. If you think about religion as a social mechanism that has evolved over time, then you can ask what purpose(s) its many rules serve and how they can help us to better understand human nature.

 

For example, though religious leaders may not have understood the exact psychology of moral reminders, they’ve certainly had enough of an intuitive sense of their importance to circulate the Ten Commandments and emphasize a whole score of other religious tenets, statutes, and regulations. Whether or not they could cite the causes for it, somewhere along the line they gathered that a good way to keep people in check was to present them with a moral benchmark to keep in mind (e.g. reciting prayers, for instance, before dinner as a continual reminder of the standards).

 

Given religion’s role in society and the way it evolves over time, I think we could benefit from using its wisdom to direct social science research. The key is to zero in on a religious tenet and ask why it’s there and what it suggests about human behavior, and to then empirically test the hypothesis with the hopes of deriving science from religious texts.

 

God bless.

Social power and morality

The following is taken from the graduation speech of Michael Lewis at Princeton in 2012. In it, he discusses an experiment that explores the relationship between power and morality.

“…… a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.

Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.”

—–

We’ve probably all heard the saying “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Well, there is a great deal of research concerning the link between social power and morality, and most of it suggests that absolute power is not required to change people’s morals; sadly it tends to show that more power leads to less care for others, and less moral behavior.

The Artistically Irrational Exhibition Series

When we decided to create the Artistically Irrational series, we hoped to catalyze the scientific process by bringing art directly into the place where we work and think.

Behavioral research is an indispensable tool for social scientists looking to understand and comment on the fascinating world in which we find ourselves. Controlled experiments allow us to measure and reflect on issues ranging from injustice to advertising, the taste of beer to medical conflicts of interest, and even social networks like Facebook or Twitter. Such experiments allow us to reliably test whether our intuitions about the world are true and figure out when, how, and why we are wrong. Art fills a similar void, filtering ideas and motivations through individual sensibilities, then taking the result and crystallizing it into something more or less universal. And although there are many differences between the worlds of Science and Art, both can provide useful social commentary. In fact, it is these very differences that invite a discussion between the two. We hope that, through this project, the scientific and artistic approaches can fertilize one another and expand the lines of communication between two fields that have so much in common but speak to one another so rarely.

The Artistically Irrational exhibition series is essentially an experiment in feedback loops. Each project begins with a discussion of social science research on a particular topic and a request for artists to express themselves through their art. Then, surrounded by the fruits of their labor, we get to further reflect on our research through their eyes, using their insights to enrich the meaning of our studies.

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Creative Dishonesty: Cheat Codes

The first show revolved around our research on cheating and dishonesty. After I spoke to a group of artists, they went back to their studios and put together their interpretations of our findings. They came back with a range of pieces exploring the nature of dishonesty – especially as it related to their own practices. Several artists investigated the moral status of artistic “borrowing” and the thin line between appropriation and flat-out plagiarism. One artist played with the idea of citation, which is virtually nonexistent in art but is a practice with rigid requirements in the sciences (see APA, 2010). Another considered how the mere label of “art” affects how we experience something, whether it is a flattened steel grid or a topsy turvy urinal. Other artists examined the spiral of bad decisions that can spring from one little transgression, and how moral reminders or cleansing rituals can help us correct our misdeeds and start over. Many explored the ways that we lie to others and ourselves, how we hold distorted worldviews and memories – and the rationalizations that go along with them.

All of these pieces revolved around an interesting finding of our research: the tendency of creatives to be less honest than non-creatives. As David Hockney said, “the moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.”

A Sample from the Show:

(click on images for larger view)

Photos taken by Aline Grüneisen

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And because the Creative Dishonesty exhibit was such a success, we decided to host another art show, this time following the theme of social and economic inequality, wealth distribution, and what is so taxing about taxation. This exhibit, PoorQuality: Inequality has just been installed and will accompany me in the Center for Advanced Hindsight until August 31.

If you can make it, I highly recommend coming to our opening reception on June 22 from 6 – 10 PM.

For more photos and information about the Artistically Irrational exhibition series, see our website or contact curator Catherine Howard at artisticallyirrational@gmail.com