Dan Ariely

Having kids

I'm terribly hurt by this. My kids think I'm hilarious.

Sorry if this was not clear. In one experiment we measured creativity with the standard scales for creativity. In another experiment we mandated creativity -- which means that we primed people in a way that make them more creative for a few min and we measured their dishonesty during that time. In yet another experiment we measured the type of job that people had and the creativity requirements of that job.

So -- non of these experiments is perfect, and it is hard to measure dishonesty, but across all the experiments the pattern is the same and I feel confidence in the results.

I hope this is more clear now.

Best

Dan

I would make taxes simple and more equitable. I also think that the complexity of the tax system makes it hard for people to remember what taxes are for, and not just see taxes as an adversarial relationship with the government

Probably the vaccination experiment -- they took a group of students and gave half of them information about the importance of vaccination, but also gave the other half directions to the health center and asked them to indicate a time in their calendars that they would show up. Amazingly, the information did very little but the map and schedule was very effective at getting people to show up and get vaccinated. For me, this is an important building block -- providing people with information is not very useful, and we need to change the environment to facilitate better decision-making.

The ability of people to rationalize. In one study, we gave people a chance to cheat -- which they took, and very quickly afterwards, they believed their own lies.

More seriously -- the right approach is to create strong habits, eliminate temptation, and build an environment that would reduce your ability to act on your temptations.

Often.

Not sure yet. I'm new to reddit.

More generally, my studies on irrational behavior make me worry about people. In terms of dishonesty, I don't think I worry more than others. But now that you've pointed this out, maybe I should be concerned that people think I am more dishonest because I study dishonesty!