Dan Ariely (on behavioral economics)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Ariely and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

Hi.

I always say Dan Shepard and our guest is Dan Ariely. Yeah. So it just felt right to do it immediately. Dan is a social scientist, bestselling author, and professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He's written a ton of wonderful books, Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, Dollars and Cents, Payoff, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

It was, and the funnel of misbelief. He really breaks that down, which is really interesting. Yes. And important, I think.

Really enjoyed this interview. so much. Me too. Yeah. Also, we're sick.

We're not contagious to you.

Yeah, you can't catch it right now. But we're all dying inside this attic, but that's okay. Please enjoy, Dan Ariely.

He's an objects man.

Dan, welcome. How are you doing?

I'm very well.

Oh, we have a visitor.

Somebody's coming. How exciting. Oh, I thought you were going to interview me. Oh, thank you, buddy. You got this for me?

No, I didn't.

Oh, my God, thank you. Good luck. I'll come see you right after, okay? That's my best friend.

I met her when I came earlier.

Oh, you did, yes. She's a special one. Okay, where were we? Pleasantries.

Pleasantries. I'm going to ask a really embarrassing question, but what state is Ducan?

You don't know?

No.

North Carolina.

Oh, that sounds completely right now that I've heard it and I'm embarrassed. Well, that's fascinating, then, because you went to undergrad at Chapel Hill?

No. So, first of all, you asked me, how am I doing? Yes, how are you doing? Let's go on over. Okay, so let's start with that, because yesterday was an unbelievable day for me.

Oh, get out of here. Oh, wow. So did you go to a viewing party?

We had a party and all the writers and some of the actors and all the people working behind the scene.

Oh, my gosh, how fun.

It was very exciting. And to see, you know, it's not me, of course, it's a made up character, but to see somebody playing a version of me on stage, with some of my sentences and some of my preferences and so on, was delightful.

Is that your first taste with show business?

Yeah. I participate in a couple of documentaries. This is like real, real show business. Where does it air? It's NBC.

Oh, okay. So one of the three big networks.

And the show is called The Irrational.

The Irrational. Oh, fun. Okay. So now back to, of course, undergrad is at University of Tel Aviv.

My first X years, I go to graduate degree at UNC, Chapel Hill. Then I also start studying at Duke. Then I graduate from UNC, then I graduate from Duke. I go for about a decade to MIT.

98 to 2008?.

A decade.

A decade, yes. Yeah. And then I moved back to Duke and I've been there since.

Okay. Now let's go back to first. PhD is in psychology.

Yeah.

Second one is in business at the urging of Daniel Kahneman.

Yes.

Okay. We had him on. How on earth does Daniel Kahneman encourage you to go learn about business?

So it's not so much learning about business, but we are dealing with decision-making. And decision-making I think is a really important field, but the theory is not really very deep. We're more interested in changing human behavior than understanding why people behave. If you look at the world around and you say, you know, we have poverty and we have procrastination and we have violence and we have all kinds of terrible things. My main objective is to change behavior, to see what's wrong and what can we fix.

You know, I had the same frustration at the conclusion of my anthropology degree, which is, I loved it. I loved learning it. And then I thought, well, what do we do with this? And in 2000,, when I graduated, there weren't even really any anthropologists working for companies, even advising. That's increased, I guess.

And, you know, for a long time, I think academics had this view that we write a paper and we have the conclusion and sometimes we say possible applications. And then we said, oh, somebody would read this paper. Somebody would look at the possible application and they would say, oh, let's do that.

Someone else would try it, not the actual scientist.

But I think that over the years, we've realized that there's a big gap between the possible application and actually being able to use it. And the question is, who is responsible for fixing that gap?

Or even agreeing on what direction we should be, to use your term, nudging all this behavior. Who's to say?

Yeah. Before we talk about the moral issue of who's to say, once you finish a paper, there's still a big gap until it becomes applicable. Should academics worry about this gap, or should a practitioner worry about that gap? And I think more and more that there's a place for some academics to worry about that gap and to try and make our findings more easily applicable for the people who want to actually go and do something.

Yeah. Who do you think would ultimately be using what was discovered? Business? Would it be governmental?

Everywhere. So every time people behave the right way, we leave them alone. And every time people misbehave, now we want to change something. And it's true for government. Think about something like texting and driving.

Interesting. Yeah. Why?

Because people, instead of texting over the wheel, they started texting under the wheel.

Ah, of course. Yeah.

So the issue is that governments set up regulations to basically get us to behave in a better way. And if they don't understand the mechanisms or what's caused us to behave, they might miss the mark. Right. The same thing is true for civic organizations. So I was just in Brazil the week before last, and I went to visit an organization that is trying to help people get out of poverty in the favelas.

You probably need a set of different people. you give $1,000 in many different ways to, and monitor the outcome.

That's right. You don't want to do it randomly. You want to have some initial thoughts about what would be helpful. And then you want to try different things and see which approaches seems to have the biggest delta. And which one depends more on each other.

Well, some of our best psychological data sets come from, like IBM, trying to figure out what their employees do and motivates them across the world, right? I see this referenced all the time.

I actually have a lot to say about that topic. if you want to. Oh, you do? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Let's do it. Let's go tangential. Because so much is based on that. The high disagreeability chart, right? That stuff comes from the IBM data.

Let me just say one more thing before that, and then we'll come back to this. But just to think about businesses. So one of my startups, and I love startups because it's a way to take ideas and implement them. We're trying to figure out how to improve the last chapter of people's lives. So think about the chapter between.

Right. Stop pursuing goals. Stop setting appointments.

And we did some research with 30-some death doulas. Doulas, help usher kids in life. Death, doulas, help usher people out. And we asked them basically, what's a good end of life? So not the five years, but the real end.

You're reverse engineering. You need a network of people that will surround you with love.

That's a quick timeline to get a network of people who will love you.

Well, I've moved to a new city and had friends by the end of the year.

Let's say the following. It's certainly longer than discovering in the last six weeks and trying to fix it.

Yeah, that is true.

But when I talk to palliative care experts, they say that they think that for the majority of the people, if done correctly, the last chapter of their life could be the best one. Like, imagine this impossible thought experiment. Somebody gets a terminal diagnosis. You do everything you can for them for the next five years. They die.

I often say, this is the gift of cancer as opposed to heart disease. My father died of cancer. We knew it was coming. All kinds of time to repair and dedicate that section of time to that. Had he gone out in a heart attack, we'd be like, well, that would have just happened.

It's complex, but you know, the question is, could we do it without it? Like imagine, everybody who became 60 would say,

Yeah, do our five-year end-of-life plan.

That's right. But we don't.

You've read Atul Gawande's book. Yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful, similar exploration. Yeah.

So, anyway, that was a detour. But now should we talk about human motivation? Okay, so, I'm not going to talk directly about IBM, but I have been researching human motivation for a while. I had a chapter of my life where I would do lab experiments, bring people to the lab, do different things, and study motivation. Then I started working with companies.

Uh-huh, right.

I said, Absolutely. So. we went on a search for data about how companies treat their employees and how the employees feel.

Because you only need to put in an incentive for the company to have growth in the stock market, to get them to implement some good culture strategies, maybe.

That's right. So that's kind of the objective of that. We basically had this observation that every CEO goes on a stage and said, The quality of my people is the best thing I have, and so on. But then, do they actually act according? But we said, If we find the connection between human motivation and stock market performance, maybe they will not just say it.

Can I ask what the metrics are for the companies that would report?

For example, we find that salary doesn't matter, but fairness in salary matters a lot.

That makes sense. This is a broken ladder. Yeah, yeah.

We find that feeling appreciated is one of the biggest predictors. We find that psychological safety is a big predictor. We find that bureaucracy kills motivation.

Meaning you can't implement an idea because there's so many hurdles.

Bureaucracy does a few things. First of all, it says to the employees, We don't trust you. You want to go to lunch, that's fine, but we need 16 receipts and a video of the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. Then it basically communicates to the employee, We don't care about your time.

We figured it out. We put it in writing. Here's the book, read it.

Everything that you try to deviate will be really, really difficult and complex to do. So. we've proven that sentiment. And the people from JP Morgan, they have a very good group that does quant research. We shared with them our data and they verified our results.

When the cats are away, the mice will play.

So how many of us during COVID have said in a meeting, Oh, my internet connection is not that good. I'm turning off my video. So the workplace has a lot of implicit ways to try and get us to be excited and motivated. And at home, people need to have more intrinsic motivation when they work at home. If you think that the struggle is between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic, COVID made the intrinsic motivation stronger.

I don't think you'd be bringing it up if it wasn't positive. It better be. I can't imagine you and me out here saying, that you shouldn't invest.

Bye.

So that measurement is not a good investment strategy.

Oh, it's not?

Oh, you are saying that.

Okay. So I was wrong. That's not a good investment strategy.

The real question is why? So I looked at my data. And in my data, it's not based on counting women. It's based on how people feel. Is promotion fair?

That makes sense.

Now, why is their data not indicative of good stock market performance? and mine is? And the reason, and that's the important thing, is that sometimes we measure silly things instead of the important things. And sometimes we measure silly things just because it's easy. So let's think about counting the number of women.

Yeah, this is the easiest metric. Like, are they happy and satisfied out of 10?? What the fuck does that mean? It's so arbitrary. Are they male or females?

That's right. If you say, let's count the numbers, it's easy to count and it gives us a feeling that it's objective. But we can have professions where it's mostly women, like teaching, nursing, and we treat all of them badly. It's not as if, as the proportion of women increases, all of a sudden, we treat them better. These are two separate issues.

I would also argue you have to be inherently suspicious of any very simple approach to understanding a very complex system. The outcome of a stock market is one of the more complex issues to look at. There are millions of variables. There's supply chain issues. You know, you can go through the list.

Let's think about something that we find like feeling appreciated. If you say I take this conclusion that feeling appreciated matters, and I can draw for you a mechanism of how feeling appreciated get people to produce much more at the workplace. And statistically, it would yield better results. Not for every company, not always, not immediately, but statistically, it's the right approach. Being treated fairly, absolutely.

Yeah, how do you implement that? Yeah.

Do you have the answer?

How to implement?

Yeah.

I actually don't want to give an answer for that. And I'll tell you why. I think that every company should find its own answer, for example, to how to get people to feel appreciated. Let's say we came up with a recipe that says, oh, twice a week, say thank you to somebody. Right.

If it's obligatory, it's innately.

It becomes an obligation. Yeah. It makes it feel non-genuine. And companies should figure out what's right for their culture.

I would imagine, too, in the soul searching, they're putting skin in the game. Taking the exploration may make you land on a principle or a value that you had maybe missed.

And then the other thing is, you would hope that companies will keep exploring it and will not stop. The moment you have a checklist. Yeah. We've arrived. We've said twice a week, thank you.

Buckle up for this. stock market surge, everybody. Go airplane shopping.

It's also personal. Each individual person feels appreciated differently.

Oh, totally.

Also, if you think about this approach in general, it means that we need less command and control. So imagine a big company, and then you have direct managers with five people. You want to give each one of those direct managers freedom and autonomy and do the things that's right for them and for their particular employees. But of course, we are running against a very, very strong, I think, societal pressure to try and standardize everything. There's some legal reasons to do it.

For sure. We complied. We gave the sexual harassment video. So we did everything. We can't be blamed.

We're not liable.

We have legal. We have bureaucracy. Like it's more convenient and everybody has the same, but we're actually having a cost for that. So, if you think about the company, just for simplicity, you have a hundred people managing each of them five people. If you give a standard procedure for all of them, it's very unlikely to be the right one for any of them.

Yeah, this is the myth of average.

Yeah, but if you give freedom and flexibility and so on, you basically unleash human creativity and motivation and so on, but at the cost for bureaucracy and maybe legal compliance.

It's funny. We definitely accept, at least in the Western world, that that was the flaw of communism. You can't have a centralized decision-making to address all the concerns of a market over the span of a country, yet we don't think that applies to an organization. Yeah. Okay.

So I think I'll comfort you a little bit and I'll worry you a little bit.

Okay, great, great.

So COVID starts and I feel I'm at the highlight of my academic career, because people are calling me from everywhere. Governments, companies, what to do? You know, it's obviously a question of a virus, but there's also a lot of social science. What do we do with distant education? What do we do with paying people on furlough?

How do we motivate people to comply with these?

Everything, right? And I feel amazing. I'm with two phones and my computer. Social science, I've said for a long time, is unbelievably important.

And now it's your time to shine.

It's amazing and I feel useful. So we have a few months of this when I feel at the height of my career.

And can I quickly ask, because I feel like I was following this closely. Were you out in front of cameras and stuff?

No, I'm just answering questions as fast as I can and talking to everybody in the world who wants to talk to me. And then, at some point in July, I get an email from somebody I once helped and she says, Dan, how have you changed? How you become this person? I answered quickly, what do you mean? And I get a list of links and I'll describe just one of them.

When you were 17?.

Yeah, I was badly burned, 70% of my body, three years in hospital. Three years? Almost three years, yeah.

Unreal.

Burns are really, really tough, very tough.

Yeah, you're so what, susceptible to infection?

First of all, the body can heal itself better when there's good blood supply. But when you get burned and there's no good blood supply and it's such an extensive part, takes forever. And, by the way, this happened many years ago. This happened when I was 17 and a half. I'm 56 now.

Oh, they called it a plandemic? Yeah.

Oh, wonderful. They really gave me a good role, right?

I was like the- Yeah, mastermind. Mastermind. Forgetting, you're not a biologist. Yes.

And then I tried to argue, and I tried to explain myself.

Can I ask quickly, how ubiquitous was this? Like, if we had to put it on a scale, QAnon will say it was a 10, that reached a 10.. What is this conspiracy? How many people are engaged in thinking you were this? I know Fauci, I put him at a 6, right, or a 7..

Yeah, very hard for me to tell.

Yeah, because you're inside of it.

When all this is happening, I'm saying to myself, these people are clearly wrong. And if they only knew, they will change their opinion.

Probably the illusion that you could correct them.

That's right. And to my benefit, I would say I did call some experts to ask them, and they all said, don't engage. I engaged. I couldn't. It was too hard.

It doesn't respect the complexity of it. Also, it denies that we ourselves are also in this.

Exactly.

When we can't fix it. That we're somehow different.

And it doesn't help us fix it. So this book has three components. It has a little bit of my story. Most of the book is about this funnel of misbelief. It's about the way I characterize this machine that takes people and change them.

Yeah, I need a new hobby. I'm going to go shopping for a conspiracy theory.

Yeah, it's worse than that, because it's a trivial observation, but took me a while to get to. it, is that people who believe in God believe the world is basically a good place, with a little bit of devil from time to time. But the people who believe in conspiracies or misbeliefs, their lives is actually quite difficult. So misbelief is not just about believing in something wrong. It's about adopting a worldview that the world is out there to get us in some important ways.

Well, they're looking for proof of evil all around them and they're finding it.

That's right. Just think about how tough it is to live like this. It's not a choice.

Well, if you look at some of the definitions of depression, one of them is having a pessimistic view of the future as opposed to an optimistic, which most people have, and they're stuck in a very pessimistic.

Worse than pessimistic. It's an evil intention everywhere and powerful in ways we don't see and nobody else sees it either. It's a very tough thing and I think they need a lot of empathy. You know, when you think about it, it's very tough to give it to them.

It is. They are the people that need it the most and they make it the most difficult to embrace them. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

I don't want to use the word beautifully, sadly.

Okay, sadly and conveniently.

Yes, that's right.

But that principle, I've witnessed it in friends, when they've at least minimally felt disenfranchised or excluded. Now, if there's a system that you're excluded from and everyone else seems to be included, of course that system has to be broken. How could it be just?

That's exactly the starting point. So the starting point is stress. We're not talking about stress of, oh, I'm so busy. I don't know how I'll manage to do this. We're talking about stress, where you say, I don't understand the world and I'm not getting my share.

Of course.

That will be somebody else's fault. You don't want the story where it's your fault. You want a story with somebody else's fault. And the final component, which took me a while to figure out, is that you want a complex story. Now, usually we think that people like simple stories.

I'm not the inferior one here. I'm actually the only one that knows the truth.

I'm the only one, and they use words like, I'm the sighted and you're the sheep. And it's an interesting thing to think about. Okay, so we have this need for a complex story with the villain. That would give us relief. Now, here's the interesting thing.

Drug addiction.

Yeah, and then it gets worse and worse, and worse and worse. So that's the initial process. By the way, if you see people at that stage, that's a good place to try and stop it. Because if you wait too long, it will be very, very tough.

Yes. I did just want to say, that part breaks my heart. Someone, anyone would be feeling that everyone thinks they're stupid. And that the notion of, no, I'm actually smart is so appealing. That part is very heartbreaking to me.

The whole thing is heartbreaking, right? The fact that we are creating the stressful environment that is creating the breeding ground for those beliefs.

Yeah, when we leave people behind, this is what happens.

And some of it was done in COVID without paying attention. We didn't say enough. Look, we don't really know, but here is what we think right now.

Right.

Think about what it means to come up. One day you say, oh, surfaces are infected. One other day you say you don't.

It was a fertile ground. And we were all stressed, even if you had the best situation.

And then the best inoculation against stress is resilience. And mostly we get our resilience from social support. We get it from people who love us. And again, COVID made it very, very tough to get any kind of deep social support. So we created these conditions.

And there's even algorithms to assist in that. You're getting more and more fundamentalist with each recommendation.

That's right. So now we understand the starting point. And we have to admit that we as a society contribute to it, and that sometimes we as individuals.

Yes. And so a normal person is listening to that, and they're thinking, well, this couldn't happen to me, because I am more logical than that. Yes. Right?

Well, we haven't touched logic. We've just touched emotion right now.

Yes, yes, just emotion. But I think a lot of people might go like, oh, I respond to those feelings, or I can imagine having those feelings. I've had them in a different way, maybe. I think I have the type of brain that would inoculate me from this.

Yes, so, first of all, if you're that kind of person, I hope you'll never find out.

Right, the hard way.

There's a concept called scarcity mindset. The scarcity mindset is usually thought about with poverty. When you say people who are very poor and worry about where the next dollar would come from, show as if they have a diminished cognitive capacity, as if they lose IQ. And it's because part of their mind is always occupied. Will I be able to pay my bills?

But still, I admire their stick-to-it-ness.

I didn't do a test to see how many IQ points I lost. But during the day, I would basically manage to work. But part of my mind was occupied the whole time.

Well, we know from neurology, your amygdala was probably far more online than your prefrontal cortex is normally. So you're having some actual biometric physiological changes upstairs as a result.

Every ping, there's a little bit worry. Maybe it's the next death threat. It's there all the time. And some people experience when they worry for a loved one or health or finances. But it felt I lost a big component of my intellectual capacity.

Anyone who's in a relationship, just take two seconds and think about the story you have about your partner. They're messy. And how. all you see is the drawers opened up or the fridge left open or the container on the ground. But certainly the partner also put away about a thousand things, and you just don't pay attention to those things because it goes against your story that they're messy.

By the way, you could in principle change that in the relationship.

Yeah, you tell a different story.

You could basically say I'm only looking at the positive. Yeah.

My partner's conscientious and you'll start seeing examples of conscientiousness.

And to say the things that they don't do are charming.

Right, right, right.

Anyway, but we have confirmation bias, which is, the world of information has a huge range, and we look at a small part of it. But the second component, which is more worrisome, is that even when we look at information that we disagree with, we have a way to bend it to our will.

I would imagine when you were responding, this is what was happening immediately.

That's right. They were exposed to information they didn't want and they were just able to either discount it or ignore it.

Build a new thing off of it. You almost give them fuel.

Exactly. And then there's a third component, the relationship between our confidence and our knowledge.

This is a Dunning-Kruger effect.

That's part of it, exactly. There's another frame of it called the illusion of explanatory depth.

Oh, remember when we had the woman on, and it was like illusions of competency?

Oh.

Remember that? We talked about it a lot.

Vaguely.

Okay.

So I'll give you an example of how I illustrated it. So imagine we ask people about the flush toilet and we say, do you understand how a flush toilet works?

Yeah.

And people say, of course I do. It's a flush toilet.

I pull the handle, the poop goes away. The example she gave too, is a helicopter. You ask people how a helicopter works.

Exactly. And then I said to people, okay, wonderful that you understand how it works. Luckily, I have all the pieces here. Could you please assemble a flush toilet? Nobody in my sample could assemble a flush toilet.

Again, a different part of their brain is now working.

Completely not paying attention to this, just thinking about what's my defense strategy. Now, if I don't attack you, I say, I'm with you. Just help me understand. how does this exactly work. Give me the details.

You would know about these people. So I interviewed Robert Sapolsky, very intimidating man, to interview, if you have a differing opinion. I certainly don't know what he knows. And I asked another smart friend, Adam Grant. I'm like, I don't really know what to do in this situation.

It's a frightening thing to ask ourselves.

Oh, big time.

So that's the cognitive component. And then the other component is basically personality. And some people are more likely to go down the funnel of misbelief and some people are less. But just because somebody doesn't have the personality traits we'll talk about, doesn't make them immune. It just makes it slightly more difficult to go down that path.

This is any belief, right? Not just a misbelief.

Any belief. Yeah. There's a very beautiful question called the bat and the ball that I'm sure you've heard about.

No, you should explain it.

Okay, so the bat and the ball. So here's a simple math problem. I'll say it, but don't answer.

Okay.

A bat and the ball cost together $1.10.. The bat cost $1 more than the ball. And now we ask people, how much is the ball? And there are basically two approaches. Most people, the first answer that comes to their mind is $0.10..

Yeah, impulse.

And some people say, let me check myself. When it turns out that the people who trust their intuition and follow it are more likely to go to the funnel of misbelief than the people who question themselves. And you can imagine how it would work. You see a video describing X, Y, or Z. Say, it sounds right.

Well, we got to close that loop. What would the price of the ball be?

$0.05 and $1.05..

Okay, thank you.

It's a dollar difference. Right, perfect. And then it's together $1.10.. Okay, whew.

Yeah.

You got it.

No, no, he explained it.

I explained it a little fast.

I was the $0.10 person.

My first thought was that, and then I was like, no, that's $1.20.. And then I started going backwards into $0.90.. I'm like, well, hold on a second.

I was like, oh, it's $0.10, but we're being tricked. So I know it's not $0.10, but I don't know what it is. So $0.10?.

That's right.

And you know, this is not the right condition to be asked. math problems. The second attribute comes from a really interesting research. So do you know that some people believe that they were abducted by aliens?

I love this example.

This is my favorite story about misbelief. It turns out, like many misbeliefs, that there's some grain of truth in it. And in the issue with people who feel like they were abducted by aliens, it turns out that when we have REM sleep, our mind transmits instructions to the body. Save the princess, jump over the thing, slay the dragon, all kinds of things, but we don't move because the mind also paralyzes the body. The brain thinks it's sending instructions, but they don't get to fruition.

It's happened to me.

It's happened to you?

You're one of the 8%.

That's scary.

Do you want to describe how it feels to you?

Yeah, I mean, your brain is awake. You're cognizant of what's going on. Well, this was my experience. Cognizant of what's going on around you, but you can't move.

And you think you've become paralyzed. somehow, I'd imagine, right?

You're stuck in your body and you can't say anything.

You can't wake your body up.

But you know, like I was in college, and so my roommate was at her computer, and I knew she was at the computer, but I couldn't say, hey, help, or do something. Yeah, it was scary.

Yeah. So let's say it happens to about 8% of the people. Not all of them say, oh, I was abducted by aliens. That's the reason. What separates the people who, like you, say something really strange happened to my body from the people who say, oh, I was abducted by aliens?

I've just been returned.

I wish I had thought of that.

Thought of that. Yeah.

That's way cooler. That is cooler.

I know. And one of the differences is that they connect the dots in ways that are not supported by the evidence. So imagine, for example, I read to you a list of 10 types of fruit. And then I say, hey, let me read to you another list of fruit and tell me if they were in the first list or not. If you confuse new fruit with old fruit.

Your example is if you said apples, bananas, oranges, and then in 10 minutes, you said, hey, was apricots on that list? There is some group of people that would insert apricots.

Oh, interesting. That's right.

Do we know a percentage of people that think that way? Or does everyone do that?

Everybody does it a little bit. But the more you do it, so if you have sleep paralysis, you might become an alien abductee. Right. Right? Because what happened is there is a question of interpretation.

Well, you're looking for causality. So you'd likely start with, or me, I think of myself as highly rational. I would go like, did I eat something different last night, right? Like, first thing to be like, what anomaly occurred in my life that has resulted in this? You know, it's funny.

That's your own experience, because you—.

Have autoimmune.

Yeah, and you understand that your body is really sensitive to food. So that's where your brain goes. Everyone's brain just goes by their own history.

Other people are more susceptible to alien abduction. I wouldn't have thought that.

Well, also, if you are into sci-fi, I mean, I wouldn't have even thought about alien abduction.

By the way, we didn't go into details of your description, but many people describe lights. I mean, there's other things that happened as the system changes from REM sleep to awakening. And if it happens in the middle of a dream, life is much more confusing. So anyway, this ability to tell a story, thinking that more things happened, they really did, but to complete the story, by the way, could be a really good attribute for an artist. Creative, seeing dots.

Oh, we should have said it much earlier when we were talking about stress. But will you just tell Monica about when people are under high stress and you show them a completely unpatterned, random assortment of dots, what happens? Because I think that's really relevant at this moment.

Yeah. So we talked about what stress does. Our system wants to have an answer. So one way to do it is to show people what we call white noise. So white noise is sometimes noise, like shh.

There's a cortisol dump. Didn't really matter why it dumped.

The more stress you have now, the more your system needs a story. By the way, if you look at the correlation between violence and stress, the US is kind of above the line, in the sense that there's more conspiracy theories than would be explained by the amount of violence in the country.

Oh, I have an armchair theory on that, which is I also think our individualistic capitalist society prizes those individual achievements more than other countries. So when you're not achieving and accomplishing the dream, it is more painful than it is in, say, a collectivist society.

We can speculate, but I'll give you two other possibilities.

Okay. Well, you got to vote on that one. Does that sound okay to you? Yeah, yeah.

One is that as a country gets a higher rate of inequality, resilience goes down. So if you think that resilience is an antidote to stress, even at the level of a neighborhood, as inequality goes up, people are less likely to go to the neighbor and ask for help. So something about resilience changes.

Do you read The Broken Ladder? It's a great book about income inequality. Yeah, and it talks about just the perception of being poor as opposed to being quantifiably. poor has more disastrous outcomes on educational achievement, health, everything.

Yeah, and then the second explanation could be is that the U.S. has a lot of violence that is not physical. So think about our partisan system and the aggression that we have on the left and right. that wouldn't be quantified as violence, but could have related effects. So we said stress, cognitive personality, and then the thing that kind of seals the deal is the social element.

I would say from the anthropological lens, what you're immediately doing, for that person is creating us and them. And once you are them, we all know we're all capable of all manner of atrocities against them and we have no compassion for them. It's one of the strongest things. And then ostracizing, for 280,000 years we were here, meant literal death. And we know it.

Very, very strong. And now it leads to the next component. So imagine somebody is ostracized and exactly what you said, what would they do now? They would go and look for a group that gives them the social support that they need.

They need so bad community at this point.

So there was one post, the misbelievers in COVID thought one day there will be Nuremberg 2.0 trials for the crimes against humanity during COVID. And this guy wrote a very long post about my specific crimes against humanity. And he ended the post questioning whether I should get life in prison or public hanging.

Those are two options on the table.

And there were about a thousand people who responded. Oh, wow. If you just read the tone of their responses, it would look like these are people that are gathered together to solve poverty and to do something wonderful, or maybe plan a party. It was all so positive. There were so many loves and people appreciated his writing style and the wisdom.

With the shared knowledge.

And it's not about the truth. Am I tribe A or tribe B?

Am I on your team?

That's right. And now think a little bit about this in our current political discourse. Sometimes people say crazy things. And when they say crazy thing, you say, do they really mean that? Or is this shibboleth?

Oh, this is the great question of the last 10 years. Are they in on it or not?

Especially in the beginning. Because later on, I think something changed. But let's think about the first time somebody says something. Are they talking about the truth here and I'm telling you a piece of information? Or are they saying, you think it's about a piece of information, but I'm saying something ridiculous on purpose.

The proclamation didn't come true.

That was his assumption.

Yeah, very arrogant.

And pre-Festinger, you would say the die-hard believers, the one who gave their homes and sold their properties and gave everything to charity and said goodbye to everybody, they would be the most disappointed. And the next day, when they wake up and the Earth is still there and no alien came, they would just say, I am leaving. And the people that were on the fence, you would say, they never believed it so much, they wouldn't be too disappointed. Maybe they would even stay. But Festinger said the thing will happen would be the opposite.

Yeah, and I was wrong.

And he said that they would actually strengthen their belief in her. And that's what he saw. He saw that the people who were on the fence said, not a true guru will go home. But the die-hard believers actually went out to recruit more people after that. Now, if you think about what it means psychologically, it's basically that our actions drive our beliefs.

One of our favorite sayings is it's easier to act your way into thinking different than think your way into acting different.

Yeah, that's the essence of cognitive dissonance. And the bigger the action is, the more it influences. So now think about what it means in terms of our story about misbelievers. It means that once people have invested in the social media and demonstrations, whatever it is, how can they go back? And indeed, that's what we see.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare.

I've looked very hard to find people who came back. I found very, very few. I'm hoping that we'll be able to understand it better one day. But statistically, when you look at the numbers of people who say, oh, turns out we were wrong. Yeah.

Well, let me ask you this. This is what I sometimes ruminate on, and I guess it's the only optimism I have. Let's take the phenomena that you just laid out, that you have to get more and more extreme. It's almost like entropy, right? It's going to enter a phase where there's nowhere else to go.

I don't see us fatiguing out of this, because I think the cognitive, emotional shortcut is not to get out of it, but to stay in it. Let's say, if you look at the percentage of Americans who are okay with their kids marrying somebody from the other side of the political spectrum. These numbers are changing and not for better.

Do you remember a ballpark of what they are? How many people are opposed to that?

I think it's slightly less than 50%, but close to 50%. Now, if you think about that and you say somebody gets fatigued, I think they would just stay with your opinion rather than be open to adopt it. I don't think fatigue is a good mechanism to bring change. I'll tell you what I do think. We started with whether this conversation is going to be optimistic or pessimistic.

Minimally, I would say we would have to agree that upriver is the solution, which is as we track, let's say, meth addiction, your odds of recovery if you're snorting meth is X percent. If you're smoking it, if you're shooting it, you're done. It's like a 5%. It's so low that you can't really spend your energy trying to intervene with someone that's shooting it. You got to start with someone who's snorting it.

That's why, for me, the metaphor of the funnel is very good, because you say, okay, catch people early and figure out what we need to do. There are things we could do as individuals. Social support, what would it take to change your mind, the illusion of explanatory depth, not ostracize. There are things we have to do on the social networks side. The fact is that, I don't know about you, but when social networks started, I thought this was an amazing innovation that would propel humanity forward.

Worse. Yeah, worse, for sure.

Exactly. When COVID started, I called some people that I know in the pharmaceutical industry and I said, why don't you start showing the scientists who are working day and night? Why don't you start documenting this? I said, I hope at some point this will be kind of the shining moment where the pharmaceutical industry could save the world.

Could be a complete rebranding of Big Pharma.

And of course, everybody was too busy to do anything and the priorities were different and so on, but I think it's a very missed opportunity. I think if people had a live camera in many of the labs and they would see the way that people were working tirelessly to try and come up with things and fail. I mean, it's just a heroic story, but it's not the story that is being told. The story that is eventually being told has none of the tears and sweat and effort and ingenuity. Eventually, the story has been taken from them and played out in a very different way.

Yeah. In a very, very political way. Well, it's incredible. Now, I need your help. I have an inherent problem.

I am happy to talk about anything.

Okay. So, you did a bunch of work on nudging.

I wouldn't call it nudging, but I did a bunch of work on changing behavior.

Okay. One of them being that if we switch the line, you sign at the end of a questionnaire, I promise these were all truthful, if you move that to the top of the questionnaire, you'll see that people are more truthful. And then a lot of stuff was built on the back of that.

That's right.

And so, one of the three experiments in particular, and correct me as I go, I'm just learning of this, I was bummed to learn this, that's not what I want to learn, was this data that came from a health provider.

It came from a car insurance company.

And the thought was they have to report their odometer readings at some point. And so, this is a great opportunity. There's going to be 13,000 people asked to do this. Half of them will tell them to be truthful at the top and the other half will be truthful at the bottom. It was reported that it was very effective.

Yep.

And the insurance provider has come out since and said that wasn't our data. We only turned over 3,700 examples, not 13,000.. The paper was since removed. A lot of critics came out. So, I think A, I'm not a shame monster.

So, first of all, let me set the record straight in some important ways. Okay. There was a paper that I got the data in somewhere around 2007, 2008, that we found out later was falsifying. We actually found out about it two years ago. I acted all along in a very trusting way with the data.

Hold on, though. I just got to push back a little bit. A mistake is I accidentally read that wrong. I was given this and I should have assessed it. Claiming you had 13,000 bits of data when there was only 3,000..

My mistake was that I trusted this data.

But are you claiming you trusted the data that came from the insurance provider or from your team who was analyzing the data?

This is a very strange story and it's a story about a very long time ago. And it's very hard for me. I've been trying for two years to understand what happened. Yeah. But somewhere along the way, by the time I had confidence in this data, some very bad things happened to the data.

We would agree. someone manipulated it. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm saying it was falsified. Yes. Okay, great. The data was falsified. There's no question about it.

That you outsource.

Something very bad happened under my watch. I take responsibility. So the data was falsified. Defining about signature up front and signature in the bottom holds. Since then, for example, we re-ran all kinds of experiments.

Which I read was not achievable.

No, no, no. Very much achievable.

There's the example of this scientist that worked with you guys went to Guatemala to help with the taxes.

Yes. So I don't know how much you want to go into this, but that study in Guatemala used a very different approach and a very different method. And it's true he didn't find it. But there's lots of nuances about this. But if you look at what the British government did, if you look at what the U.S.

Yeah. Let's just say that, again, I've done this. I've errored enormously and come out and dealt with it. And that's a very specific experience.

It's also a specific experience to, and this happens a lot, I think, for people at the top, the boss, right? You are expected to sometimes remove yourself from the job, to take full responsibility. I don't know all the details, but this happens a lot where you have to leave because of something that happened underneath you, because it's expected.

Like the Admiral of a ship, you're saying. Yeah.

And that is ultimately true.

That one doesn't interest me if I'm being honest, because then you're not culpable. My hunch is you're culpable in some way. And I want to know what it's like to publicly confront being culpable in something. And if you think in retrospect, oh, I think I know what I came to. I understand how the mind works.

I had the experience of being accused by the misbelievers for a while before this happened. So I had some kind of both extra sensitivity and some inoculations, because death threats are a different category.

than angry professors. Yeah.

But of course, one of them is my reference group, the people that I feel belong to. So I would say, when I found out about the data falsification before it became public, I was distraught. It was terrible to know that something like this could happen. under my watch. I tried as much as I could to understand how it happened, and I basically did not sleep.

Oh, sure. Absolutely, yeah.

And I actually, in my naivete, thought that when this would become public, the field would take a deep look inside and say, this is something we all do, there's a level of trust that we have, and what are some of the mechanisms that we should do? And I prepared for that because I talked with my lab, I talked with some people, and I started creating algorithms that would help us do it in a standardized way. Not everybody has to invent the wheels, but we say, okay, if we're now going to basically run some algorithmic checks, let's do it together. But when it came out, that was not the response. The response was very personal and very, very different.

Do you think the reaction would have been softer if you hadn't been so celebrated as a behavioral scientist?

Of course. I think I saw that last year there were about 2,000 papers that got retracted. It's not that it never happens, and it shouldn't happen. I mean, we should work very hard to do it, but there are also lots of car accidents. Bad things happened, but the personal attacks were very hurtful.

Eating our own. We love to eat our own.

But then, in the same way that when I look at the misbelievers, I don't try to blame them. I look at the system, and I look at human nature. I still try to look at it in the same approach, and I say, here is the world they live in.

Yeah. I guess it would be really tempting for you, because in many ways you've been ostracized in that moment, and we know what happens to people that are ostracized, so how do you combat that?

You can think about that. this book is my attempt to find the villain. Oh, lovely. It took me a long time to get to that, but here I was, villainized, stressed, scarcity, mindset, death threats, and, like everybody else, I need a story, and I need a villain. This book is really my attempt to find the villain, and the villain I found is a combination of human nature and media and some other things in society.

The villain's vestigial evolution, I think, at all times. It's designed to live in a way we don't live anymore.

So, this book really is my complex story about what is happening in the world, and why I got to be where I was, and when I look at whatever, academics and so on, I look at it in the same way. I basically distant myself a little bit, and I try to understand how this process is working. So it's not that I don't take things personally, but most of the time, I look from the side with kind of an amazement and interest.

Do you worry, because when we talked at the very beginning about the end of life, and the things that you...

Legacy was the fifth thing.

That's what I was about to say, that that has had an impact on your legacy?

No, I'm not worried, and I'll tell you why. I think that it's very easy to make very loud accusations in the short term, but I still believe that in the long term, the right things would come out. So if I was going to end my life in the next week, I would say, okay, maybe things are not balanced the way I want, but if you say I have at least five more years, things have a way to crystallize over the long term, and I feel good about myself, because as much as I look back and I try to find out, do I have any memory of ever doing something that I think was ill-intentioned, I have zero memories of things like that. I feel very confident as a positive, contributing human being. I wake up every day with a desire to help.