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
In life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces.
It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating - on our taxes or on the football field.
While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.
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.
When we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride.
Companies, however unintentionally, choke the motivation out of their employees.
Believing you are a bad person leads to a slippery slope.
None of us always make the best financial decisions.
When we save, everybody in the household is just suffering. By having the coin in a visible way, when you scratch, you can say the person that is in charge of the making money for the family is doing the right thing.
What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.
Rainy day savings are incredibly important, because from time to time, bad things happen. And if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be really terrible.
The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.
Do you know how much money you would save if you changed your light bulb to compact florescent light bubs? How much would you save if you decreased your temperature of your house in the winter by one degree, or increase it by one degree? We just don't know these numbers, but I think displays could make it a memorable change in terms of attention, and also help us translate it in terms of concrete ways on what you can get.
If you have loans, the first thing you want to do is say, "Okay, look I have a credit card, if I really need to borrow, I have this emergency money that I can get, but for now there is no reason for me to keep cash at zero percent interest rate and at the same time, pay all of this money out. So, I think people need to figure out quickly how to pay loans and how much cash they should really keep.