Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely (born April 29, 1967) is an Israeli-American professor and author. He serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Ariely is the co-founder of several companies implementing insights from behavioral science. Ariely wrote an advice column called Ask Ariely in the WSJ from June 2012 until September 2022. Ariely is the author of the three New York Times best selling books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. He co-produced the 2015 documentary (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies.
Since 2021, Ariely has faced multiple accusations of data fraud and academic misconduct, which have resulted in a retracted paper.
Biography
Dan Ariely was born to Yoram and Dafna Ariely in New York City while his father was studying for an MBA degree at Columbia University. He has two sisters. The family immigrated to Israel when he was three years old. He grew up in Ramat Hasharon and attended Makif Hasharon High School.
In his senior year of high school, Ariely was active in Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed, an Israeli youth movement. While he was preparing a (fire inscription) for a traditional nighttime ceremony, the flammable materials he was mixing exploded, causing third-degree burns to over 70 percent of his body. In his writings entitled "Painful Lessons," Ariely described his hospitalization and treatments, detailing how that experience led to his research on "how to better deliver painful and unavoidable treatments to patients."
Ariely was previously married to Sumedha (Sumi) Gupta in 1998. They have two children.
Education and academic career
Ariely was a physics and mathematics major at Tel Aviv University but transferred to philosophy and psychology. However, in his last year he dropped philosophy and concentrated solely on psychology, graduating in 1991. In 1994 he earned a masters in cognitive psychology, and in 1996 he earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ariely completed a second Ph.D. in Business Administration at Duke University in 1998, at the urging of Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Ariely taught at MIT between 1998 and 2008, where he was formerly the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management and at the MIT Media Lab.
In 2008, Ariely returned to Duke University as James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics. Ariely's laboratory at Duke University, the Center for Advanced Hindsight, pursues research in subjects like the psychology of money, decision making by physicians and patients, cheating, and social justice.
In 2008, Ariely, along with his co-authors, Rebecca Waber, Ziv Carmon and Baba Shiv, was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in medicine for their research demonstrating that "high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine."
Business career
Ariely has co-founded a number of companies. In 2010, Ariely co-founded BEworks, a management consulting firm dedicated to applying behavioral science to business and policy challenges. BEworks was acquired by kyu Collective in January 2017. In 2012, he co-founded Timeful with Yoav Shoham and Jacob Bank, developing a time management app. Timeful was acquired by Google in 2015. He also co-founded the companies Genie (a kitchen appliance for cooking healthy food, 2013), Shapa (health monitoring, 2017), Kayma (behavioral research for the Israeli Ministry of Finance, 2018), and Irrational Capital (quantifying corporate culture for investors, 2018).
In 2015, Ariely invested in and was named chief behavioral economist for Qapital, which develops a personal finance app and collaborates with Ariely on research on consumer saving and spending behavior. In 2016, Ariely was named Chief Behavioral Officer for Lemonade, an insurance company, to integrate aspects of behavioral economics into Lemonade's insurance model.
Controversy
Experiment without ethics approval
In 2006, when Ariely was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, he conducted experiments including electric shocks without the fully finalized procedure of ethics approval. MIT's Institutional Review Board (IRB) originally granted a human experiment, but afterwards there was a change in the protocol for which a fresh approval was only granted after the experiments had been conducted. MIT's ethics committee banned Ariely from conducting experiments for a year. The university found that Ariely's assistant in running the study had no human-subjects training. Ariely confirmed that he was suspended from research at MIT and said that he thought the experiments had been approved, and that he did not remember receiving a letter asking additional questions.
Manipulated data in an experiment about dishonesty
In August 2021, data from a field study in a 2012 PNAS paper by Lisa L. Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Dan Ariely, and Max H. Bazerman was reanalyzed on the blog Data Colada. The blog post claimed that the study data was fabricated. All of the 2012 study's authors agreed with this assessment and the paper was retracted. The study's authors also agreed that Ariely was the only author to have had access to the data prior to transmitting it in its fraudulent form to Nina Mazar, the analyst in February of 2011. Dan Ariely denied manipulating the data prior to forwarding it on to Mazar but Excel metadata showed that he created the spreadsheet and was the last to edit it. In the 2011 email exchange provided by Mazar, she pointed out to Ariely that the effect was in the opposite direction of what they hypothesized. In response, Ariely claimed that he had accidentally reversed every value in the conditions column of the dataset when he relabeled them to make them more descriptive and asked her to flip them all back. She complied. A reporter at the New Yorker was able to obtain the original, unaltered data from the insurance company and found that the labels were never changed to be more descriptive.
Ariely suggested that the data may have been fabricated by someone at the insurance company that had provided it. In a July 2023 episode covering the allegations of misconduct, NPR's Planet Money published a statement of The Hartford, the insurance company in question, alleging substantial differences between the original dataset sent to Ariely in May 2008 and the data published by Ariely and colleagues. The company said it found "significant changes made to the size, shape and characteristics of our data after we provided it and without our knowledge or consent." For example, the statement said that the provided dataset contained 6,033 vehicles, while the published dataset contained 20,741. The company said that on the dataset it had provided, there was no "statistically significant difference between those who signed forms at the beginning and those who signed forms at the end", and noted that the published dataset used two different fonts, with data in Calibri font being tied to their data while data in Cambria font "appears to have been synthesized or fabricated". Planet Money included a response by Ariely that "I got the data file from the insurance company in about 2007, and I can't tell now who had access to it. Getting the data file was the extent of my involvement with the data."
Other disputes about data reliability
In 2010, Ariely told NPR in an interview that data from Delta Dental, an insurance provider, showed that dentists frequently (with a probability of "about 50 percent") misdiagnosed cavities when analyzing X-rays, and speculated that this might happen so that dentists could charge more money. A Delta Dental spokesperson denied collecting data that could support such a conclusion. Ariely maintained that he was told about the finding by a Delta Dental medical officer whom Ariely did not identify. Ariely had not seen or analyzed any data to back up the claim.
In July 2021, the journal Psychological Science challenged a 2004 paper by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, "prompted by some uncertainty regarding the values of statistical tests reported in the article and the analytic approach taken to the data". The authors were unable to resolve the ambiguities because the original participant-level data was no longer available. A follow-up analysis, and a letter to the editor by Gregory Francis from the Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University demonstrated that the problem in the paper could be a simple reporting error in which t-statistics were reported as F-statistics by mistake. Francis also showed that this error does not negate the findings in the original article.
In November 2022, a TV investigation show Hamakor (Channel 13) aired an episode questioning a number of Ariely's studies that were not reproducible or for which there are significant doubts about their reliability—the way they were carried out, the data that were collected or whether they were carried out at all. For example, Ariely claimed that data for his "Ten Commandments" study (Amir, Mazar, and Ariely, 2008) was collected in 2004–2005 at UCLA with the assistance of Professor Aimee Drolet Rossi. However, Drolet Rossi claims that she does not recall that she or her research assistants ran the study as the authors described and she subsequently posted her 2021 email exchanges on the subject. She also claimed in the email exchange that the study described in the paper could not have been run by her or her colleagues at UCLA because the protocol described in the study was inconsistent with the data collection methods used at UCLA by Drolet Rossi and her UCLA colleagues at the time.
Published works
Books
Ariely is the author of several popular science books about irrationality, dishonesty, and decision making. His first book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, was published in 2008 and discusses a number of systematic mistakes people commit, mostly in financial decision. Examples include overlooking downsides of "free" offers, framing effects, the problems of procrastination and self-control, and the endowment effect. In The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (2010), Ariely discusses the effects of irrationality on the workplace and personal life. Other books include Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves.
Second edition in 2012
Amazing Decisions: The Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals (illustrated by Matt R. Trower), Hill & Wang, 2019, p. 224,
Selected articles
Audio and video appearances
How equal do we want the world to be? You'd be surprised (TED2015)
Are we in control of our own decisions? (EG 2008)
Our buggy moral code (TED2009)
Beware conflicts of interest (TED2011)
What makes us feel good about our work? (TEDxRiodelaPlata 2012)
(Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
References
Further reading
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "Big Little Lies: Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino got famous studying dishonesty. Did they fabricate some of their work?", The New Yorker, 9 October 2023, pp. 40-53.
External links
1967 births
Living people
Jewish American economists
Economists from New York (state)
Behavioral economists
Israeli economists
Israeli Jews
Fuqua School of Business alumni
Duke University faculty
MIT Sloan School of Management faculty
Tel Aviv University alumni
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni
Positive psychologists
MIT Media Lab people
21st-century American economists
21st-century American Jews