Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely
Dan Arielyis the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics. He teaches at Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and also the co-founder of BEworks. Ariely's talks on TED have been watched over 7.8 million times. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best sellers, as well as The Honest Truth about Dishonesty...
NationalityIsraeli
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth29 April 1967
CountryIsrael
...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.
People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.
For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively.
The problem with opportunity cost is that opportunity cost is divided among many, many things.
The major thing that holds you back when you're trying to change a bad habit like eating, smoking, or drinking too much is your belief you are out of control.
The companies that provide debt, what do you think their goal is? Is their goal for you to fully understand the cost of your debt? No. So they're basically creating these approaches to make you feel like it is incredibly cheap or just to think about the cost per day rather the cost per year or cost for a lifetime. So debt is very simple mistake.
But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .
The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you're actually more and more likely to fail.
We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.
The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.
The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. … The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying ‘uh huh,’ [you] dramatically improve people's motivations.
Brands communicate in two directions: they help us tell other people something about ourselves, but they also help us form ideas about who we are.
Money is all about opportunity cost. Every time you spend on something, that's something you can't spend on something else.
There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.