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Today he can be relatively detached in describing the explosion and its painful aftermath. But in public settings, the memories can be searing. Some years ago, he broke into tears as he talked about the episode at an academic conference. It happened again in New York on his recent book tour, providing, he says, "a very good lesson on the power of emotions and our inability to predict their onset."
One of Ariely's early fascinations was with the power of a sports passion. As a graduate student, he explored the tenting tradition that precedes Duke basketball games. Back then, the tradition hinged on a lottery; now, early camping-out ensures a place in the Cameron crowd. Would the students who had won tickets in the lottery value those tickets more than those who lost? Ariely and a colleague surveyed more than 100 students. In general, the lottery losers were willing to pay around $170 for a ticket. A typical student in that category, "William," declared that $175 is a lot of money, and for that price he could watch the game at a sports bar, spend some money on beer and food, and still have a lot left over for other purchases. On the other hand, the students treated well in the lottery valued the ticket highly; they demanded about $2,400 for it. As "Joseph," a ticket-clutching student, told the researchers, the game would be a defining memory of his time at Duke. How could you put a price on memories?
From a rational perspective, both the ticket holders and the non-ticket holders should have thought of the game in exactly the same way. But a student's treatment in the lottery turned out to powerfully affect his or her sense of the value of the ticket. Not a single ticket holder in the survey group would sell for a price that a non-ticket holder would pay.
An event that produced a large community of losers, the Enron financial scandal, prompted Ariely to explore the value placed on honesty. He asked himself why presumably "good and charitable individuals" would steal millions of dollars from people, even as they wouldn't conceive of breaking into a private home. And what would prompt generally "honest" individuals to "borrow" a pen from an office, exaggerate the cost of a theft in a report to an insurer, or falsely report a meal with an old friend as a business expense?
So he and his colleagues devised studies that would tempt people to cheat. Student subjects, for example, would be paid for each correct answer on a multiple-choice test. In some cases, they transferred their answers to a sheet that had the correct answers pre-marked-meaning they could, if provoked into dishonesty, readily cover up their mistakes. In different versions of the experiment, the test-taking students were asked to sign a statement, just at the moment of temptation, testifying that the exercise fell under an honor system. Alternatively, they were asked first to write down the Ten Commandments.
Those gestures had a significant impact on his subjects' behavior. Once they began thinking about honesty through firm reminders, they stopped cheating completely. "In other words, when we are removed from any benchmarks of ethical thought, we tend to stray into dishonesty," Ariely observes in the book. "But if we are reminded of morality at the moment we are tempted, then we are much more likely to be honest."
It turns out, too, that people draw a sharp boundary, irrationally enough, between stealing dollars and "token" stealing. They'll shy away from walking off with $1 from the petty-cash box. And, as Ariely's experiments showed, they'll resist "fixing" their answer sheets when they're rewarded for correct answers with hard cash; they'll cheat avidly when the cash transaction is indirect-that is, when they're rewarded for correct answers with non-monetary tokens that have to be redeemed for dollars. They'll help themselves to those office pens, seeing in the act no meaning for the business' bottom line, or for their self-image of honesty. And if they're the executives of high-flying, energy-trading Enron, they'll build a house of cards on imaginative balance sheets and deprive employees and investors of their life earnings
At last count-which is certain to be out of date-Ariely is an author of more than fifty published papers. According to John Lynch, the Roy J. Bostock Professor of marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, one professional society instituted what is known informally as the Dan Ariely Rule. The rule restricts presenters to no more than three papers on a conference program. "Usually people have only one paper, maybe two, but there was a year when Dan had eight papers on the program," Lynch says. "What does he do? He's got all these projects and all these students and colleagues, and why should they not get on the program? So he just submits the papers without his name on them."
Shortly after arriving at Fuqua in 1996, Lynch started advising Ariely, whose dissertation would earn him an award from the American Marketing Association. Ariely simultaneously was pursuing a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"As his adviser, I was always trying to tell him what I thought he should do," Lynch says. "Fortunately, he didn't listen to me very often. In my experience in academia, if you write papers just for yourself, there's a danger that no one else is going to read them. I tried to tell him to think about his audience. But I think for him that sounded too calculating. It would take the fun out of it. A lot of what motivates him is that the research is so much fun for him."
Ariely and Lynch worked together on a marketing experiment in online shopping. With the cooperation of one of the Triangle area's best-known wine experts, they created two dummy online wine stores and sent Fuqua students on shopping expeditions, to observe their buying decisions. For the student shoppers, feeling well-informed was more of an imperative than bargain-basement (or bargain wine-cellar) prices. Lynch told The Wall Street Journal, which wrote about the study in 1998, "When people have more than price to go on, they become much less price-sensitive." The two researchers found that the students were more satisfied with their purchases when they were told, for example, that a wine was "soft and juicy" or "down-to-earth and fun." They were less satisfied when they received less information about wine varieties, offered on the rival site, even though that other site offered a similar product for a couple of dollars less.
Gal Zauberman Ph.D. '00, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, was a UNC undergraduate when he volunteered for an Ariely experiment in pain tolerance. He followed Ariely to earn his Ph.D. at Duke; like Ariely, he was attracted to the strong faculty in decision-making and the Ph.D. training that Fuqua offered, he says. The two have continued to collaborate, particularly on trying to figure out the influences that shape, over time, how we interpret an experience. Ariely is "certainly considered one of the most productive and creative people in our field," Zauberman says. "He has a very creative way of setting up experiments that mimic situations in life. It's easy to recognize an experiment by Dan. It always has something unexpected."
One unexpected bonus for Ariely in his Ph.D. work was meeting his future wife, Sumedha (Sumi) Gupta, also a psychology graduate student at UNC. "We mostly argued about the use of statistics and philosophy," she says. "He was quite annoying and assumed he was always correct, even when he wasn't, but was of course charming, funny, deeply caring, and surprisingly good at soccer for someone whose main sport is squash." Sumi Ariely now works for Duke's Global Health Institute, overseeing student research and fieldwork projects.
Ariely joined the MIT faculty in 1998, the same year he completed his Ph.D. at Duke. He earned tenure four years later, reportedly one of the quickest progressions to tenure in MIT history. One of his Ph.D. students was Leonard Lee, now an assistant professor of marketing at the Columbia University Business School. It's not unusual that graduate students will pursue research agendas already set by their professors, he says. But when Lee sought this professor's advice about what to research, Ariely responded with a question that took him aback: "What makes you happy?" Soon, Lee was shifting from his initial focus on e-commerce and looking instead at how consumers make decisions. Thinking about that question "was a turning point in my life," he says. "It made me see things that I could do, that I always wanted to do, but that I never had the courage to attempt because of my quantitative background."
Over years of collaboration, Lee has worked with Ariely on research questions ranging from how consumers are influenced by retail coupons at different stages in their shopping, to how individuals are affected by their own attractiveness when choosing whom to date. Ariely cares about his students, Lee says, not just in terms of the usual measures of academic accomplishment-finishing the dissertation, getting papers published, landing a prestigious position. When he was about to graduate from MIT, Lee was considering several job offers. Again, he turned to Ariely for advice. Ariely posed the familiar question: "What makes you happy?" Think about the life you'll be leading, he urged, not just the superficial benefits of the position.
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