Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely (דן אריאלי; 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.

In 2021, a paper with Ariely as the fourth author was discovered to be based on falsified data and was subsequently retracted. In 2024, Duke completed a 3-year confidential investigation and according to Ariely concluded that "data from the honesty-pledge paper had been falsified but found no evidence that Ariely used fake data knowingly".

Dan Ariely’s life, research and best-selling book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" inspired the television series, The Irrational. The Irrational is a NBC television series inspired by the life and research of Dan Ariely. It premiered on September 25, 2023.

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."

Professional Ventures and Affiliations
In addition to his writing endeavors and role at Duke University, where he serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics, Ariely has become actively involved in entrepreneurship, successfully founding companies that integrate behavioral economics into the business world.

In 2013, Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman co-founded Irrational Labs, a consulting firm aimed at applying behavioral economics to consumer behavior and decision-making. Its mission, as stated on its official website, is “to make people happier, healthier & wealthier.” Irrational Labs focuses on using behavioral science to design and test solutions that drive positive change in both individual behavior and organizational practices. The firm works on various projects to understand and influence behavior, with the goal of improving people's lives through insights derived from behavioral economics. By partnering with organizations and companies, Irrational Labs addresses a wide range of issues, from health and financial decision-making to product design and workplace productivity, leveraging scientific research to create practical, impactful interventions. Irrational Labs’ team includes Evelyn Gosnell, Richard Mathera, and Katie Dove as Managing Directors, Chaning Jang as Chief Strategy Officer, and Amy Weber as Head of Business Development.

Three years before co-founding Irrational Labs, Ariely founded another consulting firm, BEworks, which applies “Behavioral Science Insights to solve Business and Policy challenges across Financial Services, Healthcare, Sustainability and other Industries.” BEworks is now acclaimed as “the world’s first management consulting firm dedicated to solving business and policy challenges using behavioral economics.”

In 2012, aspiring to develop a time management app that helps people “use time better,” Ariely co-founded Timeful with Yoav Shoham and Jacob Bank. Thanks to its successful implementation of behavioral insights to boost productivity, Timeful acquired the reputation of the “app that kills procrastination.” The app was acquired by Google in 2015.

In 2013, a meal that Ariely shared with Doron Marco led to his next venture: Genie, a company dedicated to creating a kitchen appliance for cooking healthy food. The company then created the Genie, “a food “replicator” launched in 2016 initially via coffee shops, hotels and offices in Israel and Australia to allow preservative-and-stabiliser-free freeze-dried meals to be cooked anywhere that lacks a kitchen.”

In 2015, Ariely invested in Qapital, a personal finance app that employs behavioral finance principles to help people save more, and was appointed as its Chief Behavioral Economist. His role involves leveraging behavioral economics to understand and influence consumer saving and spending behaviors. He was later “named chairman of the board of Qapital, a challenger bank.”

In 2016, Ariely took on the position of Chief Behavioral Officer at Lemonade, an insurance company that integrates aspects of behavioral economics into its insurance model to enhance customer experience and efficiency.

Ariely’s entrepreneurial ventures also include founding Shapa in 2017, a company focused on health monitoring and behavior change, and Kayma in 2018, which conducts behavioral research for the Israeli Ministry of Finance.

In 2018, Ariely co-founded Irrational Capital with David van Adelsbergin. Irrational Capital is an investment research firm that qualifies “the impact of corporate culture and employee motivation on financial performance,” designing investment strategies that offer “exposure to the Human Capital Factor, a direct link between company culture and equity returns.” Irrational Capital’s methodology involves rigorous data collection and analysis to pinpoint key drivers of employee satisfaction and productivity. By providing investors with a deeper understanding of these cultural factors, Irrational Capital identifies high-performing companies and fosters better investment decisions, allowing companies to cultivate environments that not only enhance performance but also contribute to sustainable growth. The firm collaborates with a wide range of organizations, including JP Morgan, to implement customized strategies that bolster corporate culture. Its mission is “to target the “S/Social” component of ESG via access to alpha-capturing strategies that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”

In 2018, Dan Ariely also co-founded Epilog, a company dedicated to transforming end-of-life care. Epilog believes that “life is a handful of meaningful events: the birth of a child, a glass of wine, the landing of man on the moon. This should not change even if we are seriously ill.” Aspiring to help palliative care patients maintain a positive life until its last chapter, Epilog applies behavioral economics to build trusted relationships with people, identify unmet needs, and reduce care gaps with 24/7 support. The Epilog solution therefore serves as a patient-centric, holistic, personalized companion for individuals diagnosed with serious illnesses, helping shift the focus from disease management to life management. Epilog’s success, as indicated on its official website, is rooted in its employment of compassionate technology, which enables faster and higher adoption rates at significantly lower costs. Epilog is expected to revolutionize the medical care industry, already achieving a ground-breaking 45% increase in care in palliative and hospice programs.

Ariely’s ventures attest to his life-long commitment to bridging the gap between academic research in behavioral economics and practical applications in various industries. Ariely continues working on drawing social science insights that can be then translated into better products and better decision-making across public and private industries.

The Irrational TV show
Dan Ariely’s life, research and best-selling book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" inspired the television series, The Irrational. The Irrational is a NBC television series inspired by the life and research of Dan Ariely. It premiered on September 25, 2023 The show stars Jesse L. Martin as Alec Mercer, a behavioral scientist who uses his deep understanding of human psychology to solve high-stake cases, involving governments, law enforcement, and corporations. Dan Ariely serves as a consulting producer for the show. In February 2024, NBC announced it would return for a second season. As Ariely writes, “The Irrational is a TV show on NBC that is loosely based on my life and my research (very loosely).”

Written by Arika Mittman, and with Ariely serving as a consultant, the show premiered on NBC on September 25, 2023. Upon receiving positive reviews from critics and viewers, with an approval rating of 47% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.5/10 rating on IMDb.

The Irrational draws clear parallels between the protagonist’s and Ariely’s life, with Professor Alec Baker taking on Ariely’s talents, interests, and preoccupations as a world-acclaimed behavioral scientist. Like Ariely, Baker studies the nature of rationality and decision-making, unveiling the influence of preconceived notions on human decisions. In the show, he applies his expertise to solve high-stake cases involving governments, law enforcement, and corporations.

Each episode of "The Irrational” is a subtle elaboration on the psychological forces, phenomena, and biases that Ariely exposes in his Predictibly Irrational. Episode 1, for instance, tackles the idea of False Memories, referencing social science terms such as the cocktail party effect, guilt, the identifiable victim effect, memory, paradoxical persuasion, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), reciprocity, and sense of control. Episode 2 approaches the concepts of inattentional blindess and revenge, once again alluding to key terms like boasting, curiosity, family estrangement, social alienation, hope, misdirected attention, power of free, memory triggers (of smell), unexpected loss, pride, and narcissism. The remaining episodes follow a similar pattern, with each one depicting human psychology in action.

The Irrational stars Jesse L. Martin in the role of Alec Baker; Maahra Hill as Special Agent Marisa Clark, Alec's ex-wife; Travina Springer as Kylie, Alec's younger sister; Molly Kunz as Phoebe, Alec's graduate student assistant; and Arash DeMaxi as Rizwan, Alec's newest graduate student.

Season 1 is currently streaming on Peacock and NBC.com, beckoning millions of viewers.

(Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
Directed by Yael Melamede and released in 2015, “(Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies” is a documentary film exploring the widespread dishonesty phenomenon in contemporary society. Dan Ariely anchors the film, offering expert analysis on the psychological mechanisms that drive deceit. With references to behavioral experiments and anecdotes–from athletic and academic cheating to political scandals–, Ariely draws on his research on behavioural economics and irrationality to shed light on why and how people lie. Numerous people make appearances in the documentary, including the author and marketer Ryan Holiday, to share their personal experiences with dishonesty and lies.

The documentary is notable for its seamless blending of academic rigor with compelling storytelling. By illustrating real-world examples of dishonesty, it has sparked discussions about integrity and accountability. The film has received positive reviews from critics for its insightful and engaging approach. An anonymous review on IMDB notes, “From ticket-fixing in our police departments to test-score scandals in our schools, from our elected leaders' extra-marital affairs to financial schemes undermining our economy, dishonesty seems to be a ubiquitous part of the news. But it's not just true in the headlines - we ALL cheat.”

“(Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies” is now available on Prime Video, continuing to reach a broad audience and encouraging viewers to reflect on the role of dishonesty in their own lives.

TED Talks
Dan Ariely has delivered various TED Talks on the subjects of morality, motivation and irrationality, work, self-control, human behavior, and decision-making patterns. Delivered in plain, accessible language, Ariely’s TED Talks draw from his extensive research in behavioral economics and psychology to distill complex ideas and illuminate the underlying factors that shape our everyday decisions. His TED Talk appearances have garnered significant attention for their insights into the irrational forces that drive human behavior, accumulating over 20 million views.


 * Held in 2009, Ariely’s ‘Are We in Control of Our Own Decisions?’ explores the hidden forces that shape human choices, detailing the roots and manifestations of irrational behavior. He employs the juxtaposition of visual illusions to highlight the easily deceptible nature of the human mind, highlighting the “repeatable, predictable, consistent” way our intuition deceives us. He tackles the idea of cultural differences, sharing an anecdote about the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and the strategies different countries implement in order to motivate people to sign up as organ donors. Ariely also uses a second example of a holiday to Rome or Paris to illustrate how small, seemingly insignificant factors can drastically alter our decision-making.


 * In ‘Our Buggy Moral Code,’ recorded in 2012, Ariely refers to his research experiences to shed light on intricacies of human behavior. He explains how minor changes in incentives and social norms influence behaviors like cheating, a topic of personal interest to him: “Ariely got interested in cheating after learning about the Enron scandal, when it came to light that the energy trading company Enron Corporation had been grossly exaggerating their profits and concealing billions of dollars of debt from their shareholders.” Ariely stresses the significance of empirical testing in refining our understanding of such “immoral” behaviors and advocates for evidence-based decision-making in personal, professional, and policy contexts. His insights underscore the need for policies and societal norms that are grounded in rigorous experimental evidence to achieve greater effectiveness.


 * In his 2013 TED Talk, ‘What Makes Us Feel Good About Our Work?’, Dan Ariely challenges traditional opinions that equate work motivation strictly with monetary incentives. Ariely explores the influence of factors like meaning, ownership, and challenge on human motivation and workplace satisfaction. Through experiments involving tasks such as building Lego sets and identifying letters, he suggests that meaningful engagement and recognition significantly enhance employees’ motivation. At the same time, he argues that ignoring or trivializing efforts can significantly demotivate individuals. These insights underscore the importance of non-financial elements in fostering motivation and productivity in today's knowledge economy.


 * In his 2019 TED Talk, ‘Can We Change Our Behavior for the Better?’, Ariely dives into the discrepancy between human intentions and actions, posing examples such as texting while driving and irrational financial decision-making. He questions the effectiveness of providing information to change behavior and instead vouches for altering environments to reduce friction and increase motivation. Ariely supports this with examples from studies, including efforts to switch pharmacy customers to generic medications and incentivize savings among the poor in Kenya. Ariely concludes that by understanding these principles and designing environments that align with human psychology, significant behavioral changes can be achieved–for the better.

Some of Ariely’s remaining TED Talks include ‘Self-Control,’ ‘Beware Conflicts of Interest,’ ‘Beware the Value of Trust,’ ‘How Equal Do We Want the World to Be. You’d Be Surprised,’ and ‘Why We Think It’s OK to Cheat and Steal (sometimes).’ These talks have attracted millions of viewers with their engaging delivery and utilization of real-world examples, making complicated psychological phenomena understandable to the broader, nonscientific public.

Experiment with a Research Assistant lacking ethics training
In 2006, when Ariely was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, he conducted experiments including electric shocks with a research assistant that had no human-subjects training. As a consequence the MIT's ethics committee banned Ariely from supervising data collection for a year. Ariely confirmed that he was suspended from supervising data collection at MIT and said that he did not realize that the research assistant did not have the needed one hour online human-subjects training.

Ariely released an official statement about this controversy on his website stating the following:

"So, what do I know? I certainly had approval to run this experiment. I had approval for the protocol, for the equipment, for everything. I did approach the MIT ethics board and asked them to find the original protocol, but they said that the only thing that they have now is a screenshot showing a list of all my protocols, including that protocol. And as can be seen the approval is from June 17th 2004.

I also know that one participant complained about the experiment and that she felt the pain from the electrical shocks was too high. I also know that this complaint initiated an investigation by the committee, and the investigation started they found out that something else was wrong. What was wrong? One of the research assistants running the study did not go through the hour long online training for how to deal with human subjects. Now, this was early in my days at MIT, and I was not fully aware of all the procedures. I assumed at the time that all graduate students passed the training. It turns out they did not. Having someone run a study without doing the hour long online training certainly a violation and I am guilty of that."

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 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 claim. Ariely maintained that he was told about the finding by a Delta Dental medical officer. 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 an Israeli TV investigative show, Hamakor (Channel 13), aired an episode questioning a number of Ariely's studies that were not reproducible or for which there were substantial doubts as to their reliability—as to the way they were carried out, as to the data collected, or as to whether the studies were carried out at all. For example, Ariely claimed that data for his "Ten Commandments" study (Amir, Mazar, and Ariely, 2008) were collected in 2004–2005 at UCLA with the assistance of Professor Aimee Drolet Rossi. However, Drolet Rossi denies having run the study, and UCLA has issued a statement that the study did not take place there.

Advice Column in The Wall Street Journal: ‘Ask Ariely’
Starting in June 2012, Dan Ariely contributed a weekly advice column (titled ‘Ask Ariely’) to The Wall Street Journal for a decade, leveraging crucial insights from behavioral science in order to field “questions about a wide range of personal and social issues.” From addressing health-related queries and sharing tips on the running of a successful business to elucidating why people struggled to follow social distancing measures amid the coronavirus pandemic, Ariely’s columns were written with his signature wit and research-driven insight into the irrational sides of human behavior. WSJ readers appreciated Ariely’s unique approach, praising the practical applications of his advice and the thought-provoking nature of his responses; readership and engagement remained high throughout the ten years he wrote the column. As Ariely notes in his own reflection on ‘Ask Ariely,’ published on his website, “It was always exciting for me to get a new question and reflect on what social science could say about it—not only in terms of supplying an answer, but even more, in terms of the perspective it could offer in thinking about the underlying concerns.”

Some of his most acclaimed columns include:


 * ‘Not Every Great Employee Shares Ideas’
 * 'To Relieve Stress, Try More Stress’
 * ‘Working Up the Courage to Decide’
 * ‘Stop Making Small Talk. No One Will Miss It.’
 * ‘Can a Friend Who Lies Ever Be Trusted?’
 * ‘When Fiancés Fight Over Flowers’
 * ‘When Fiancés Fight Over Flowers’
 * ‘Should Superstitions Be Toast?’
 * ‘Should Money Cut Into a New Marriage?’
 * ‘How to Handle Trashy Neighbors’

In his final column titled “A Decade’s Worth of Social-Scientific Advice,” published in September 2022, Ariely reflected on “the everyday value of social science research” and bid readers goodbye. Advice of similar kind can now be found on his social media pages on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), as well as in his podcast, where he continues to engage with experts and audiences to address contemporary issues through the lens of social science.

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, ISBN 9780374103767
 * Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, 2023
 * Amazing Decisions: The Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals (illustrated by Matt R. Trower), Hill & Wang, 2019, p. 224, ISBN 9780374103767
 * Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, 2023
 * Amazing Decisions: The Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals (illustrated by Matt R. Trower), Hill & Wang, 2019, p. 224, ISBN 9780374103767
 * Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, 2023
 * Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, 2023

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