The Jordan Harbinger Show - 417: Dan Ariely | The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

Dan Ariely (@danariely) is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions and Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations. What We Discuss with Dan Ariely: How does the What the Hell effect keep us making bad decisions even when we know they’re bad? Are we ever truly rational, unbiased, or impartial? What’s the best time to appear before a judge? How transparency in our lives can often backfire. How motivation works (and doesn’t work) and how we can use our own psychology against ourselves. And so much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/417 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. If somebody is asking you to do something a year from now, ask yourself what you would do it next week. And then there's another approach, which is we use the term cancellation. The happiness you get when something was canceled. So when somebody asked you to do something, you simulate in your mind, how happy would you be if the day before they canceled? You're going to be very busy next year, just like you are today. Just the details are not written. We understand the opportunity cost of time of today. Like if you're

asked me to do something else today, I can't. I'm booked solid. There's no way. 2018? Yeah. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional behavioral economist or money laundering experts, each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker.

Today, we're talking with behavioral economist and bestselling author Dan Ariely. You should listen to this episode if you want to learn how our brains make decisions, and more importantly, why we decide the things we do. Of course, we're never truly rational, unbiased, or impartial, even if it's our job to do just that. We'll also see what time it is best to go before a judge and why transparency in our lives can often backfire. Last but not least, how motivation works, how it doesn't work. and how we can use our own psychology against ourselves for good.

Dan is an OG in this space. If you haven't heard of them, you're going to love this episode. And of course, if you know who he is, you're going to be excited for this. So I won't keep it too much longer. But if you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and celebrities every single week, it's because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at jordanharbinger.com And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe and contribute to the course.

So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Here's Dan Ariely. This is something with my behavior, and I don't know if it's all humans, where if something goes wrong in the morning, it takes a lot of effort for me to get unflustered later on in the day. So if I wake up, like I did this morning at 4.45 a.m. for a radio appearance, and then I try to go back to sleep, that's the cardinal mistake.

Once I try to go back to sleep, if that doesn't work, I end up stressing about not being able to sleep, and then that'll carry through and then going into traffic and everything. It's just like, this morning I woke up and Jen's like, are you okay? I'm like, it's just like one thing after another. I feel like there's a skill, especially in a business that you have to have, which I am currently developing, where you are able to unfluster yourself very, very quickly. Otherwise, you'll just get washed down the drain with every little problem that pops up. Yeah, and there's a couple of versions of this story that you could have that have different mechanisms.

So one is falling asleep, right? What happens if you wake up and you try to fall asleep? And there's actually really interesting research showing that when people, try to fall asleep, they interpret the difficulty as an indication that something is wrong. Oh, really? So all of a sudden, it's not just that you fall asleep. You say, oh, why can't I fall asleep?

And these thoughts are making it harder and harder to fall asleep. But this idea of reselling in general is very, very important, right? So, and resetting can be in lots of scales. There's this notion called the what the hell effect. What the hell effect? What the hell effect?

And people mostly know these effects from dieting, right? That you're on a diet, you're in a strict diet, and then you eat the muffin. And you said yourself, I'm not on a diet, I might as well have a burger and fries and a milkshake for lunch

and then a chocolate cake for dinner. And the notion is that we view ourselves in a binary way, why the good or bad? And if you're 92% good, you can still think of yourself as a good category. But if you're 78% good,

is it really worth effort to move to 92%. Right. So basically what happened is that as long as we're not on a good side, we say what the hell, because we don't enjoy the middle ground. The middle ground is not helping us define who we are.

So we find this in dishonesty that when people start behaving badly, continuing is very easy. We find it in dieting. We find it in failing in all kinds of ways. And, you know, there are these religious mechanisms that get you to restart things. I think about the Catholic confession.

Oh, yeah, there you go. What's the logic of the Catholic confession? Clean slate. That's right. You could say it's a crazy mechanism, right? because if you know that you can sin and get absolved, what should you do? Right, just go for it. And not only that, just go for it just before confession, right?

Because you minimize time in purgatory, right? The only thing, if the mindset was the only thing I want to do is not to die without confession, still on the way to confession, you set up. But of course, that's not how confession works. Confession works by restarting a new page. And we do this at night, right, where each day is a new day with calories, right? But nature doesn't count calories by the day, that if you ate a muffin in the morning, whatever you do in the afternoon is still in the same category.

But that's why New Year is an important thing. Oh, yeah. There's all these questions of how do we reset it. In Judaism, there's the Day of Atonement. So that's all on the dishonesty side. But I think it's a much more general thing. If you're in the rut, what can you do to reset? And if you just say, let me reset, I don't think that's going to work.

You need some kind of ritual, some kind of statement, and then try something different. So if I were you and you're kind of early in the morning, discover that you're in a rut, do something different. Go for a run, do 10 push-ups. I usually work out. Yeah, I usually work out if it's in the middle of the day. If it's 8 p.m., I just go, all right, a lot of things are going wrong today. They don't need to be solved today.

I can just go to bed early. And then I'll get up early the next day and I'll have more time and a clean slate to take care of everything. Yeah. Clean slate is interesting. You know, we've done some experiments on this, on dishonesty in particular when we get people to cheat and then we change how they cheat and we give them a chance to confess. And it turns out that there are two elements of confession of the admitting what you've done wrong and asking for forgiveness are both crucial. You need both of them. Right? So you say, here's what I did wrong. Sorry, let me start fresh. Those help. And we don't have enough those mechanisms in civic society. Right. We don't. Why do you think that is? Because I don't think we have. the intuition of the separation of the self. I mean, we have some of that intuition around New Year Resolution, but we don't have enough of that intuition that says, I can put a stop and say, my past self is not an indication necessarily of who I'm going to be. We have a, I think

the intuition is that we are a much more continuous self. And if we understood that we can take this somehow artificial gaps and restart, we would use it more often. Yeah, it seems like a trick I should have learned decades ago that when I'm having an off day workout and reset. Or I'd like to say I don't have off days that often, but I do work from home so I'm able to recover or an off day seems a little bit less of a low because I'm not in front of a lot of people until I do something like this and then you see your mistakes are highlighted kind of even for yourself. Whereas if something goes wrong and no one's around and I can fix it quietly, it doesn't seem like a big problem. When you're late for your own thing and nobody knows, no big deal. When you're late and people go,

look, man, I got crap to do it today. What's your problem? Then you go, okay, maybe I need to get it back together. It becomes harder. By the way, it's not just about other people observing. It's about awareness more generally. So we find, for example, that if people work in front of a mirror, they are less dishonest. We find it if you have, this was an experiment that was done in England, where they had

kind of an owner coffee bar. Ah, okay. So you pay on your own? You pay on your own to tell you what the amount is. and they changed the pictures above the money collection box. And sometimes it was a picture of eyes and sometimes a picture of flowers. And people left three times more money

when it was a picture of eyes. Now, when you see a picture of eyes, you don't think yourself, ooh, somebody's looking. You don't confuse that this is a camera or something like that. But there is an awareness of the outside perspective, you're all of a bit more aware to yourself. Think about walking in front of a big display window.

where you can actually see your shadow or a reflection of yourself, there's an increased awareness of ourselves and it gets us to behave very differently. So actually, lots of behaviors, it's as if we're turning a slightly blind eye to our own behavior, right? You ask people, how healthy were you,

what have you done? We kind of delude ourselves very quickly that we are much nicer and healthier. I mean, story of everybody's life, right? How did you eat last week? oh, it was pretty healthy. Well, okay, I went to McDonald's like three times. Well, I drank, but that was the weekend.

So that doesn't really count in my answer. And there's all kinds of things like that. That's right. And the moment you have kind of the outside perspective, your accountability increases a little bit and people behave better. Look at undergrads. We did some studies on productivity.

Undergrads rarely study in the dorm room. They go to the library or they go to somewhere public. Why? Because they want to meet girls. But there's probably another. reason. So one is, of course, they think they'll stay in the room, they'll just go to sleep. Yeah, that's accurate. But they also want to have the feeling that somebody might look at their screen. So if nobody is looking, they can spend the whole day, Facebook, YouTube, and so on. But if in

the library, they have high responsibility to other people around, somebody could pass by, they would feel that they're wasting the time. And that actually helps them kind of adhere to the commitment to study at least a little bit. I can see that. I mean, I was a much better student in law school than I was in undergrad, and I'll tell you, working in the quiet reading room where it looks like, I went to Michigan, so it's like bookshelves and it's a stone room and everyone's quiet. Everyone's taking it pretty seriously. And they don't let just anybody in there. You have to be a certified, you know, bar accredited attorney or a student at that law school, you know, undergrad, et cetera. So you go into this area where it's like the ritual is quiet,

study, get it done. So if you're there and you're playing poker, there were those guys that were just so socially inept that even sitting in a place like that where you're supposed to be working, it just lost all of its effect after a while. But I'll tell you, when I went in there, I kind of wanted to get out of there because it was intense. And so I got my studying done and I got out of there because otherwise it was over. And there is the question of what is the environment tells us that our role should be. Sure. Yeah. And we accept that role and then we act in the consequence of that. And which is why it's so hard. I mean, you said you work at home. Sometimes it's very hard to work from home because there's this mixture of roles. The environment basically

reminds us about what our role is and the environment gives us all kinds of different hues. It's time to do laundry, make lunch, make another lunch. Yes, make a little snack. The environment of working from home took me years to be able to work effectively from home. I would say six years ago, five years ago, I would get started around 2 p.m. because it was hard to get out of bed because there was nobody waiting for you. And then you'd get up and you'd go to the gym and then you'd make some food and then you're kind of tired and then you want to make some calls. And then you look for the easiest thing because you haven't planned out your day or you'd have gotten up early and gotten something done. So you just

start with the easy activity and then it's 5 o'clock and you go, I can't start that big project thing now. It's too late in the day. I'll do it tomorrow. Yeah. By the way, this problem is not just limited to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. If you think about the things we have to do, we have a lot of small tasks that we just have to do. And what's interesting is they give us a bizarre sense of reward because it makes us feel as if we're making progress. Sure. And the official name for this is structured procrastination.

Oh, perfect. I have that. I do that well. And basically, kind of the prototype for this is making to do lists, right? You make a do list and item number one is make a do list. And you cross it out. You write things and you cross them out and you haven't done that much. In fact, you've taken time away for making a do-do list.

making real progress and just made the list. And by the way, there's some good list. The process of doing small things and checking them off gives us a sense as if we're making progress where the hard things are very bizarre because they don't give us a sense of, the sense of progress is very elusive. It's blunted by that struggle

that you'd go through to get it done. Yeah, right? So first of all, it's a long term, right? You could spend the whole day and you can say, you come home and you're significant, I said, what do you do? Say, honey, today, I was thinking the whole day. I thought.

That's your job. Nothing good came out, but I was thinking, you know, make all kinds of mistakes. Maybe I'm thinking a little bit better now, but you don't feel like it was a useful day. No. Whereas you say, I got to inbox zero. Oh, my goodness. Now it's an achievement. Pat yourself on the back.

There's another bizarre thing about progress, which I kind of worry a little bit about digital tools. You know, I wrote a few books. And I think that's for every book I maybe edited it. I'm not talking about writing. Maybe edited it 50 times, right? Where you read it again and rethink about it and change something. things and just edit and edit and edit. The whole thing 50 times. Yeah, about.

That sounds like an absolutely horrendous amount of work. It's a lot of work, but it's actually quite pleasurable. Over time, I think I write slower and I enjoy it more. That's great. For me, it's a bit like, I'm not such a good writer, but it's a little like wine where I think about sentences and

now if you have a deadline and that's a different story, but if you're just writing, it's a very wonderful activity. But anyway, the first book for predictably irrational, you know, I had this version of it. It took me a long time, and I looked at it, and I had the thought of, like, why didn't I just write this version to start? Like, you know, why did we have all the other versions?

Like, why can't there is? Now, imagine you wrote everything on hard copy. You would have kind of a sense of your progression. Oh, you mean like you're handwriting it and then you re-handwrite it? Let's say you did. I'm not recommending it. But let's say you did. Let's say you did.

But you had a hard copy of all the versions. you would probably understand some of the progress in your own thinking. Sure. You would say, oh, I really thought about that example, and later on I understood something else and I change it and so on. But in a digital world, when we just write on top of other things, and there's no history for the progress of thought, it's much easier to say, I should have started here.

Sure, yeah. Right, because you don't actually understand the journey of thinking. And I think one of the problems is that we don't understand how much time thinking takes and how the pure efforts and the pure focusing and trying to resolve a problem and think about all the angles actually get you somewhere. Now sometimes you go in a direction, discover it was just a waste of time, but you come back and you refine your thinking. It's an activity that gives you very little short-term reward. Sure. Yeah. It's incredibly valuable. But if you say, what would get me to think at the end of the day that I had a productive day? If I thought for

four more hours or answered email for four more hours. However, what would make you happier at the end of the month, year, at the end of your life? Ten books or zero inbox? That's right. When you get to your deathbed, you could say, I had 278 days of zero inbox. Yes. In my lifetime. What an achievement. So we do the urgent. And it's actually a very sad thing. I think there's something about the way, the electronic way in which the world is progressing, that we have more of those things that give us the short dopamine hit, yeah. I got something, I got something. I have a feeling that on Monday morning,

there's a huge group of people who show up to work don't really feel like doing anything. Work just seems too daunting, so instead they email me. They email you, yeah. You know, what can I do to feel like I've done some work? Sure. It's not just me, of course,

but we do this make work that give us a sense of progress without delving to the things that actually give us long-term satisfaction. So you're basically resting on your laurels. You're kind of saying, this thing has 10 steps. The last one is a big one. But let's just call them 10 steps. I've done 5 out of the 10. I'm basically an expert already.

The problem is when your laurels are made out of crappy tinsel and plastic and you're supposed to do something ironclad, you're in trouble if you're resting on those laurels. There's another thing which is called implementation intention, if you know the term. No, I never heard that. Implementation intention is the idea that we have. have very fuzzy plans for life. And we make concrete plans only in very specific cases or only when we

get close to the event. So let's say where you want to go on vacation next summer. And I said, what would you need to go to plan your vacation? You would say, you know, I'll have to decide where to go and get a flight ticket. It will be at that level. Right. Okay. Two days before the event, you will think about very specific things. You will think about immunization and passport, who is going to take care of your dog and who will water the plant. Long term in advance, we have these very, very fuzzy plans that don't actually help us make any progress.

And the plans get consolidated only when we get very close to the event. One experiment we did was this was in a local supermarket that was selling kind of sandwiches and drinks for lunch. So it was a supermarket, but lunch activity was mostly people coming to buy a sandwich and a drink. And people on average were spending six dollars. And we gave people a coupon that said,

spend $8, get a dollar off. Okay. And what happened? Basically, we got lots of people who spent $8, right? Valuable. There were some people who gave them a coupon

and said, spend $4 or more, get a dollar off. You know what happened to those people? They spend less. Why? They could have spent $6 and get a dollar off, but the $4 kind of

got them to think that they should try and aim for $4. I see. And they did. But here's the interesting thing. This coupon of saying, spend $8,

get a dollar off. Some people got it outside of the store, 12 feet before they entered the store, and some people got it once they entered the store. What happened? The effect of the coupon was higher for people who got it outside of the store. Because outside of the store, they had very fuzzy plans about what they were going to get. They knew they were going to get a sandwich and a drink, but which sandwich and which drink could change.

They hadn't thought about it yet. They hadn't thought about it. So they got a coupon that says, spend $8, get a dollar off. They said, oh, let's spend $8. And then when they got to the counter, that was their starting point. Once people entered the store, they already got concrete plans of what they wanted to do. And they already had a specific sandwich and a specific drink in mind. And then when you give them a coupon, it doesn't change their behavior in the same way.

So a big part of it is to think about what are concrete plans for acting. Acting doesn't come about by having very general plans of what to do in life. action come from having concrete plans and even putting into your calendar and say when you're going to do it. The question is what kind of things cause us to create concrete plans? Sometimes it's the closeness of the event in time.

Like you get close to the sandwich counter, you need to pick one up. Time's taken. But in your case, if you have some long-term goal, you might do the easy things because it gives you a short-term satisfaction as if you're making progress. But the things that are more difficult,

you never get them to be concrete. There's no urgency to put them on the agenda so they never get executed. Right. That's why people have to-do lists that have things on them that say write book at the top and it's been there for three years

and it's never getting checked up. Even page one doesn't. You know you're doing structured procrastination well. When you're putting things on your checklist, your to-do list that you've already done just so that you can cross them out. That's right. Then you're a master.

Then you've got the PhD structured procrastination. At one point I started doing things like that and then I thought, okay, this is objectively not helpful. at all. I figured out that the number one productivity tool for me personally, and for most people, that's underutilizes the calendar because we always think we need these reminders and these Pomodoro timer 20 second bursts of work. But if you don't know the day before or the day out, 20 minutes or whatever it is, it depends how intense your work is. That's the work out, the 20 second

tabata timer. But if you're doing the 20 minutes of work as hard as you can, but you don't know what you're going to do, you're in trouble. And what you really need is a calendar. And then when you have all those things structured in there, you can also put the big things on the calendar so that they get done and everything else that smaller just fills in around it. And you just make those appointments and those gym memberships and everything that you've got in there is equally important so you don't skip them. But it's a lot easier said than done. Because once you have that calendar, you're faced with the accountability that you slapped over that 8 a.m. time slot where you were going to study Chinese. You know, you slept through that. And now you know that. It's harder to back.

rationalize that that was okay. Yeah, and the calendar has all kind of challenges. I think the calendar is a very, it's actually a wonderful, but also a very misguided tool. You know, the calendar was designed for coordination with other people. So what do we have? We have, it's based on time,

and at 3 p.m., you're going to meet somebody for this kind of meeting, and it's really good for that. But if you think about something like working on a book, yes, we can do a hack. We can say every day from 9 to 11, I'll do this book. But shouldn't some days be from 8.30 to 11, and sometimes in the evenings and so on.

The problem is that there's a lot of things that are not easily written down in the correct time on the calendar. If you have a task that might take 1,000 hours, there's no natural way to put it on the calendar. Right. If you have a task that take three minutes, like drinking a glass of water

or calling your mother, it doesn't fit on your calendar either. So the calendar is really optimized for meetings. You only call your mom for three minutes? No, 15, 20, right? Got it. But the calendar is not good for lots of things. No, that's true.

It's good for some things. So what happened is that the rest of it, you can actually try and do a hack and write them anyway, even though it's not ideal. Right, like a one hour block where you do 20 different little things? That's right. So you say time for little things,

time for email, time for Facebook, big chunk of time to do important tasks, but you don't know what it will be. So you can do hacks around that. But that's so time consuming, and it's not perfect. But what happens is most people don't do that. And then what happened?

They look at their calendar, and you say, oh my goodness, I'm free. I have nothing to do. Right. What should I do with this time? Netflix. Meeting. Somebody's asking for a meeting.

Of course I can. There's a little suggestions we give people, which is to, if somebody is asking you to do something a year from now, ask yourself what you would do it next week. That is such a great idea. I read that in your book and I thought this is life changing because the problem in this bears repeating. If somebody asks you to do something a long time from now, ask yourself if you would do it next week. because the problem that I had up until very recently, and I think in part from reading some of your work, I realized, wow, I do this to myself all the time.

Oh, yeah, I'll totally travel to Idaho for your birthday party in three months. Why wouldn't I do that? And then two weeks before that, I look at my monthly calendar and I go, why do I have plans to go to Idaho for this birthday party? How do I get out of this? How do I not do that?

Yep. And then there's another approach, which is we use the term, cancel elation. This is the happiness you get when something was canceled. So when somebody asked you to do something, you simulate in your mind, how happy would you be if the day before they canceled?

Right. And if you're really happy. Don't reschedule it if you can. But that's the thing, right? You're going to be very busy next year, just like you are today. The details are not written. So we don't understand the opportunity costs of time.

We understand the opportunity cost of time of today. Like if you ask me to do something else today, I can't. I'm booked solid. there's no way. 2018? Yeah, look at my calendar. It looks quite free.

Look the whole day. Block off the whole day. Yeah. But the calendar, I don't think the calendar is enough. I do think we need extra hacks around it. Look, the big, meaningful things that we want to do take time and they don't give us the same jolt of momentary satisfaction when we do them. Right. Sadly, long-term happiness, nobody reports that answering more emails give them long-term happiness.

So how do we get the impact? So how do we get the important to weigh more than the urgent? And how do we say no? How do we basically say, you know what? Yes, I have a million emails. Yes, I know I will not be able to get to all of them. But there's this thing that is a high priority for me, and I want to make sure that I don't procrastinate it every day

and therefore never get to it. I want to make sure I start. And we need some hacks around the calendar to help us do this, some discipline around it. So do you have calendar hacks or hacks around the calendar other than just making sure you have the appropriate amounts of time blocked off? So a few years ago, we actually had a little startup called Timeful, that we tried to do that.

So what we tried to do was to ask people, what do you want to do? And we would see people with things like, you know, I want to read more, I want to exercise, I want to call my mother, I have these big projects. And then we would take those things, and we had kind of an AI background, and scheduled for people in specific times, and also see when people did them not. and then we would, over time, try to schedule in better times. And we learned lots of things. We learn, for example, that the first two hours of the day

are generally hours that people have high cognitive capacity. Really? Yeah. I'm not talking like 5 a.m. You walk up at 5 today. Yeah, it was awful. We're not talking 5 to 7. But 9 to 11 are usually very good hours for people.

And if you come to the office at 9 and you have kind of high capacity, in the first two hours you do email and Facebook. It's all wasted. You just took, the hours that we have high capacity are so precious. You have a few of those a day. And they're so much more productive than the hours after lunch where you can hardly function. Yeah. And nevertheless, we don't use them right.

So we would also try to take this into account. Like our model was, imagine you're a factory and you have lots of different tasks coming your way. And you have some hours that you're productive and some hours you're not productive. And how do you create priorities and how do you figure out where to put what? So we actually had lots of success. We got people to call their mothers and drink water and exercise. And reading is incredible. You talk to people about reading and people say, I haven't read.

And then you say, you know what? Read 15 minutes a day. Let's just put in your calendar, read 15 minutes a day. It helps you fall asleep better and you say you want to read. It's amazing what you could do in 15 minutes a day if you do it. If you do it, yeah. Or writing. An average book has, let's say, 80,000 words.

if you wrote a thousand words a day, how many days will take you to write the book? Three months, counting all the editing in the days you took off to do other things. But yeah, I mean, you say if you wrote a thousand words a day, if you wrote 500 words a day, you could produce two books a year. Almost nobody is at that level of productivity

because we just don't get it. Like the amount of low productivity we have is just painful. And to put that in perspective, I remember when I was a kid counting approximately how many words I could write on one of those standard college-rolled papers. That was 500 words. That's not that much writing.

Email, you're writing much more than 500 words a day. Oh, yeah. But it's a very different story. Actually, thinking and slowly and writing and so on. B.F. Skinner, the famous psychologist, basically had this rule that he would come to the office and he would write, I think, 730 words, and he would stop on the words.

730 words, middle of a sentence and stuff. He would stop. But he had this very, and he was unbelievably prolific. So trying to figure out how we prioritize the things are actually important for us and stick to it is very useful. Here's another thing. I became very interested in rules. And the thing is that if you leave things to your own judgment

every time, you're likely to fail. Yeah, I was going to say, I hope he doesn't say that's the best way to do it because that strategy is not work for me. Right? But the moment you have a rule, you basically have taken some decision out of your mind. And actually, there's an interesting story.

There's an orthodox Jewish scholar, a Koleil Dessler, who said that if you take all the Jewish people and you order them from the least religious person on the left to the most religious person on the right, and that's true for all religions. One of the differences is they have more and more rules that dictate their lives that are outside of their consideration. Right?

So if you're secular person, you have to decide about everything. Yes. what you dress and what you eat and so on. As you become more and more religious, religion doesn't regulate everything in life, but it regulates more and more. Sure. You don't have a question of what you're going to do Saturday.

Especially if you're a Hasidic Jew or Gere. You know that sect? Gare? Super strict. Yeah. The decision has been carried out for you, and it's kind of interesting. When I travel, I sometimes try to meet Chief Rabbites.

I'm very curious about religion. Like, think about, you know, you're interested in startups. What are the most successful social institutions out there? Sure, yeah. And I'm using the word successful in terms of survival, not in terms of necessarily positive impacts on human life. Sure, religion, yeah, absolutely. Clearly, right?

Yeah, clearly, right? What's working so well? So there's lots of things. Guilt. There's lots of things about religion. There are complex organizations. So I asked the chief rabbi of England and of South Africa, I said,

if I was going to keep one of the Ten Commandments, what would you recommend? What do you think they recommended? I'm guessing it's going to be the one that's like the Sabbath or something. Really? Yeah. Why?

And they both said the same thing. They said, look, first of all, you don't need a commandment telling not to kill. That's true. It's kind of obvious. But some of them are less obvious, but they say, if you think about progress in life, we think that taking a day off,

decrease progress. What we don't see is how much freedom it gives us and how much clarity of mind and rest and so on to create this. So I actually tried, once a random Sabbath and once on the Day of Atonement. I don't work on the Sabbath.

It's not a lot. It's a very interesting process to be in a day that you say on this day there's no electronics. Because usually when I'm home, no matter what I do, 15, 25% of my brain is occupied by the email that I'm probably getting.

Right. Like as we speak now, you're probably simulating what kind of email you're having all the things you're not answering, your phone is off, maybe all this notification, who did you respond?

It's very hard not to have part of our mind being busy. But when you say this is a day there's no electronics, and not only that, it has a higher order meaning. Right, it's not just your decision. Even if you don't believe in God, you say there's a social agreement about this being an issue. Imagine that every day you consider whether you should recycle or not.

Should I recycle? How much benefit is it giving the municipality? It's cold outside, it's raining. On many days, you would decide not worth it. But if you had the rule that said good people recycle, very different story. Now every instant is not just about yes or not to recycle. It's about the fact that there's a principle that you want to adhere to. Being a vegetarian basically helps people do something that they want.

But by having this rule and having a moral judgment around it, being vegan even more, it helps people adhere to those rules. So in the same way, I think that with productivity, there's all kinds of rules that we can create and we might not want to give them the same, you know, moral judgments that vegans have about the rest of us. But I think that those things would certainly help with productivity. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show

with our guest, Dan Ariely. We'll be right back. And now, back to Dan Ariely on the Jordan Harbinger show. So are these all identity-based behaviors, right? So it's, okay, you are a vegan, and you are Jewish, you are Catholic, because it seems like you could use that to shape other people's behavior.

And not necessarily in a nefarious way. I mean, you could do this with kids. For example, if your kid won't share, you can say, what would Captain America do? Captain America share? Instead of why don't you wanna share? Well, I don't want to, I want the whole piece of candy. You say, well, would Captain America share?

Captain America might share. So identity is very helpful. It's very helpful because it creates this sense of continuity. So even, for example, saying people, do you save or are you a saver? Are you a voter? Basically, all of those things that create identity help. Now, you can have rules without identity, right? You could say, every day, from eight to nine, I don't open email, I don't open Facebook, I don't open YouTube, I just write. And you can have a rule like this and you can try to adhere to it. I'm a writer.

It's more powerful. Yeah, but if you want to add to it, there's all kind of things you can add in terms of motivation. Identity is helpful, public commitment. I mean, there's all kinds of things that you could do to make it more powerful. If you're a vegetarian, it's kind of funny. I'm a vegetarian at home. Really?

We never eat meat. I think it's multiple reasons. Some ideology about animals, some worry about modern agriculture and some health. But it's not identity. It's not identity in a strong way because I'm not a vegetarian.

But I created two separate contexts where I don't do it at home, But when I'm traveling, I have different rules. The rule is whatever's easier. I'm much tasty, I'm on the menu. I say, yes. Give me two of those. Yeah.

But the moment, if you can get people to have it as an identity, it's much easier to maintain the rule. That's really interesting. So I can see that working with parenting. I can see that working within corporations that have strong corporate identity. For example, people who work here, we stay late, we work hard, we help each other out.

We don't steal office a plot. Whatever it is, you, want because that's how we roll here at, I don't know, Apple, NASDAQ, whatever it is, you know, that we go the extra mile. And you can see that in the marketing, but if you can do that with your employees and your team or loyalty, if you're talent recruiting, people are constantly being recruited away from you like they are here in Silicon Valley, if loyalty is the identity that your company has, you might stand to benefit strongly from that as an organization. Absolutely. People seek identity in many, many ways. And there's so many ways in which

we don't allow people to extract all the joy of identity that they could. When I was still teaching at MIT, I am kind of a strange life, right? I do research, and I do research on chocolate and bionicles, and I give people a chance to steal money for me. And I had this assistant, he had this very strange job because basically he had to fight with MIT accounting people

to reimburse me for chocolates and Legos and people stealing money. But his life was basically constrained to an interface with SAP and the MIT accounting people. How long did he last in that position? Well, I wanted to buy a vending machine, and they were appalled. Like, why do I want a vending machine and where's my business like?

Anyway, so the guy was just suffering. You know, he was actually an important part of the research process because without him, we couldn't have done anything. How are you going to get your vending machine? But he also had no idea why he was doing anything that he was doing. So after a while, I started inviting him to our lab,

meetings. Now, he was an administrator. His job was to put numbers into an SAP form. Somebody else would push another button and so on. That was his job. But I invite him to a lab meeting and he was not a PhD student, he was not the researcher, but he got a glimpse of why we were doing what we were doing. And his understanding and his commitment to his role was very, very different afterward. And I think too often we have kind of the Charlie Chaplin modern day's kind of approach to people who work, right? People are just doing widgets, so people are just kind of labor and we can just replace them. Some companies, particularly some of the big ones in Silicon Valley, have this idea that all programmers should be interchangeable. And if somebody leaves,

we could just move a little bit of the people around and we all have cubicles. And cubicles, I think, there's some companies, less here, less in Silicon Valley, but there's some companies that the cubicles, people don't even have the same cubicle every day. That was in the book, wasn't it? I just read about this. That's right. This was in payoff. Yes. I rose about this. There's some companies that people come in the morning and they just rows of empty cubicles and if you come earlier in the morning, you get to

pick a good one, but you can never have a picture and you can have nothing, right? And it just gives you the notion that you're replace. That is just, it reminds me of that movie, it's an old black and white German movie. I think it's called Metropolis or something. Have you seen it? Yeah. Where they're just pushing coal

levers in some sweaty basement somewhere? That's right. And I think that, you know, we treat too many people like that. No, it's not exactly like that. But if you think about the continuum between doing something which is completely mechanical without thinking, without knowing, and you think about the other way, which is to know why you're doing it and seeing the people that you bring joy and have a full set of understanding of your role in the world, I don't think we take advantage of that continuum. If we were any company and we would start bringing testimonials from customers about how their lives have changed in a positive way.

We would take time from people's lives. Sure. Right? So you could say, oh, my employer should do another two forms at SAP rather than listen to some customer talking about how much improvement they got in aspect X, Y, or Z. And we have this functional view that said, let's not waste their time because the real job, what's their obligation is to fill all these forms. And we don't think about the fact that they should care about these forms.

They should want to do them well. and they should want to do them in a way that is improving things, and they might say a little later, and caring is something that we can get only by increasing more the meaning of what people are doing, and we don't do a good job there.

And we can do that in part, through identity. That's right. Nice. I love that. You have a great documentary that I saw a long time ago. I mean years ago, it was the first time I emailed you out of the blue. The documentary, which will link up in the show notes here, you talk a lot about cheating and lying,

and I'd love to hear some of the conclusion, Because first of all, I believe that pretty much everybody at some point in their life, no matter how good of a person they are, has cheated on something in school or a game or hopefully not anything more severe than that, but we know what happens. Why do people cheat in the first place?

Yeah, so actually, you know, dishonesty is a, first of all, it's a fascinating topic by itself, but it's also a wonderful lens to think about almost everything in life. Yeah. Because the model we have for dishonesty is a cost-benefit analysis. It's a model in which people say,

what do I stand to gain, what do I stand to lose. Here's a, you know, a bodega, how much money do they have, what's a chance I'll get caught, how much time will I get in prison, let me figure out if that's a good idea to steal to rob the place. The reality is that, first of all, we don't know. I mean, if I asked you, like, I gave you a list of potential crimes and I say, how much time will you get in prison for each of those? And I'm an attorney and I have no idea.

And I guarantee you even a criminal lawyer probably wouldn't have exact idea. So, A, we don't really know. but also that's not how we think about things. Instead, what's interesting is we have this internal judgment about what we feel good and bad about. And what we feel good and bad about is about our conscience. It's not about outcomes in life. And what's interesting is that it turns out

that dishonesty is all about rationalizations. It's all about the question of what can you do and get away with and not get away with from the perspective of not being caught. Get away with from the perspective of you not think of yourself as a bad person. So it's what can you do and still maintain the idea

that you're a wonderful caring human being. And lots of things help this rationalization. It's always the case about what can you do and still feel that you're okay. And a lot of things help that. Everybody else is doing it. Sure.

I was screwed before. It's my turn. Right, I'm making up for it. I own a vending machine. I'll tell you about this vending machine experiment. I set up the vending machine to say 75 cents for each candy, but the inside of the machine I set up to be zero.

So what happened is no matter how much money you put, the machine said everything is changed. Let's give you back everything and the candy. Right. So you come in, there's all these buttons, you put your money, you press the button, you get your candy and all your money back. Oh, man.

And there's a big sign that says, if something is wrong with the machine, please call this number. Right. And it's my cell phone number, so I know when people are calling. So question number one, what percentage of the people called?

Probably not that many. Zero. Zero, right? Because when I think is something wrong with this machine, I mean, my candy didn't come out, my money stayed in there. Exactly.

Not it gave me free candy. Exactly. So nobody called. And then how many candies do you think people took? I think it was empty after a certain period of time. It was, by how many,

the average person, how many candies do they take? Like, would one person just empty the machine? No, I don't think so. I think at some point they're going to go, I've had enough.

But I don't think it would just be one, would it? That's right. So the majority he took either three or four. Yeah, that sounds about right. Nobody took five. You're revealing your own level of dishonesty.

But nobody took five. And I think what they were saying is they were saying something like, I remember this other vending machine that took my money and didn't give me a candy. This is vending machine justice. Karma. Actually, the only mystery is why it takes so long

for the world to get back to me. I should have been getting this for free years ago. That's right. That's right. And that other vending machine must have been a close relative of this one. It just, you know, we're evening things out.

So rationalization is a big part of it, and a lot of things help rationalization. By the way, it's kind of shocking that we have this model of cost-benefit analysis, and it's not just that we have this model, but we do legislation-based. So think about something like the death penalty. Sure. The death penalty is based on the idea that people would say, oh, I don't want to die, let me not commit this crime. Imagine you come home at night and you're pissed off with your significant other.

When you go to the kitchen and you take a big knife, and you say, oh, we have the death penalty here. Let's do something else. Unlakely. Unlakely. The results show that the death penalty have no effect. No deterrent effect. No deterrent.

No deterrent. California, three strikes in you out. No effect. Right, especially because it's not proportional to the crime. I mean, if you shopless three times and now you're in jail for life, it's ridiculous. But not only it's ridiculous. It wasn't a deterrent, right?

It wasn't the same people said, oh, I had twice already, let me stop now. This is just not how people think. Now, it would be nice if people thought this way. Like, I'm on my second strike. I really shouldn't steal that Fifth Avenue candy bar from that any machine. Let me change my life now.

So what happened is that we have this model of how people behave. The model is inaccurate. We go ahead and we design the world. We create legislation and rules and litigation. We try to change how we regulate banking based on this wrong model about how the world works. So in fact, if we understood how the world worked

from the beginning, we would set up the system in a much better way. So think about Wall Street. Are there really psychopaths who are trying to steal our money in 2007, eight, and so on? I mean, some of those people that I worked with certainly were, but I think the majority are probably just people who are, one, rationalizing,

you know, oh, my parents were poor and I was poor growing up, and I'm really. And not just that, they say everybody is doing it. Everybody's true, everybody they know is doing it. And they would say things like, nobody would buy it if it doesn't make sense. And it's rational, and this is what I'm supposed to do, and I'm doing it for the shareholders.

and this is my fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of the company. You know, people make up these stories and we don't regulate that. So instead of regulating conflicts of interest, we're treating the problem as if the real issue is planned dishonesty rather than something that comes from

incremental behavior design. This makes sense. And slippery slopes. If we're talking about lying instead of cheating, shifting from cheating to lying, how does this affect our brain? Because in the documentary, it seems like there's an assertion

that the brain might adapt to being untruthful, to telling untruths? The term I try to use is dishonesty. Instead of lying. Instead of lying, because I think that I would much prefer to describe the act as being dishonest, whereas I think lying implies intention.

Okay. A lot of times, because of rationalization, yes, you are lying, but do you truly understand at that moment that you were lying? I'm not so sure. I mean, it depends. In certain cases, for sure not, right?

You know, think about something like Robin Hood. Imagine Robin Hood. Great rationalization. Stealing from the rich. Do you think he felt bad? No. I've seen that cartoon. You can feel bad at all.

They're right. So the act can be described as dishonest, but lying, I think, is actually much less common than people think. I think there are many more cases where it's wishful blindness and sometimes self-deception or not complete awareness

of what we're doing. So I think it's a much better way to think about it. My question was, does our brain then adapt to that dishonesty? Absolutely. And how does it adapt? What's this process look like?

What are we seeing here? So the brain mostly reactive changes, right? So when you move from outside to the inside, in the beginning it looks very dark, a few minutes into it, your brain is used to it. Adaptation is about the fact that you get used to what you have. Like in the morning when you put your clothes on, you knew you were putting them on.

Right, I was aware. You were aware. I didn't do a very great job today, but I was aware of what was going on. Look, love you. Thank you. But later on the day, you don't notice that anymore. And that's what the brain is supposed to do. It's supposed to kind of get us to be neutral at the level of constant activation

and just pay attention to things that are deviating from that. And the same thing happens with life, that the moment or dishonesty, the moment you start acting in a dishonest way, it's not as surprising. It's just kind of in the background. It's kind of like the light changes a bit. That's just the normal state of affairs. So again, if you think about us as being dishonest because we do cost-benefit analysis

and we calculate all the time and so on, that's a very different model. Right. But if you say what makes me feel comfortable and uncomfortable, the question is do you even notice it? And the answer is we often don't even notice it. Why? Because we've done it so much. It's just the norm.

Here's an experiment. You take two people that don't know each other. You put them in a room and you say, please introduce yourself, talk to the other person for 10 minutes. They introduce themselves. Ten minutes later, you put them into separate room and you say, did you lie in these 10 minutes? And almost everybody says no.

Yeah, sure. And then you say, luckily, we taped everything you've said. Why don't we play it back to you sentence by sentence and tell us which each sentence, was it perfectly true? Oh, man. On average, people say that they lie between two and three times after you do this excess. Really? Now, what happened is that social lying we just do all the time.

What kind of examples are we talking about? I just told you, you look nice. This is terrible shirt with this white pants. I know. So, all right, nailed it on the example. It was a little too fast. But no, the reality is that we have a lot of social niceties, for example. I'm not saying that people get to a room and, you know,

kind of selling the Brooklyn Bridge to somebody. But we have all kinds of things. We exaggerate about our GPA and, you know, if it's an undergrad, or we say nicer things about, I mean, this is a part of the social niceties of the world. We kind of smooth over some uncomfortable things in life, and we do it for ourselves, and we do it for other people. Now, at the moment that we do it, do we catch ourselves?

Oh, my goodness, I told them I was late because, like, you told me today that you were late because there was traffic. Right. That was actually true. How many times in your life have you blamed traffic when, in fact, it was just that you got up too late and started working too late and should have... You know what?

I actually, as of the past few months and years, I never lie about anything consciously, right? Like, the social lying probably happens. But today, if I were running late because I got up too late, I probably wouldn't have said I got up too late. I would have just said, I'm running late, and I just left it blank at the end. But I had what I thought was a good reason.

So I was like, oh, yes, traffic. Now I'm additionally late because of traffic. Yes, that's right. So, you know, what will happen if you got up late and there was traffic? We wouldn't say, I got up late and there was traffic. No, I would have just been, thank you, traffic. All right.

And we don't catch ourselves doing it. because it's kind of such a part of the standard norm. And now we talk about just white lies and social lying, but of course it goes into all kinds of things at the moment you start doing something. It just become your model of working. You don't pay attention to it. It doesn't register.

This could be a slippery slope, or does that not bear out? Absolutely. A guy that we interviewed for the movie, his name is Joe Pep. Joe was a cyclist. He was cycling for the U.S. Olympic team. Oh, right. Very, very good.

cyclist. Anyway, he cycled for the Olympic team, went back to school, got his degree, went back to cycling, first race, he feels he is just as good, everybody else is slightly better. That night, he cries, cycling was all his, well, one of his friends gives him an address and a name of a physician. He goes to see this physician, white coat, stytoscope, gives him a prescription for EPO. EPO is a cancer drug that increases the production of red blood cells. Goes to the pharmacy, the prescription, they give him the prescription. His insurance company pays for it. He only pays the deductible.

Goes back to his room. He takes all kinds of medication, you know, for health. I mean, legal stuff, right? Sure. But he also inject this one time, then another time, then another time, then another time, then another time. Then he discovers everybody in the team does it. Then they do it together.

Later on, there's a shortage of EPO. But he has friends on a Chinese team. They put him in touch with factory in China. He imports EPO. So another team, they ask him to import as well. He's a good guy. He helps them as well. Now he's a drug dealer.

Now he's a drug dealer. Think about this story. If you talk to Joe when he was like 19, racing for the Olympic team and you say, Joe, what are the odds that you will become a drug dealer? Yeah, he would say, are you out of your mind? Never. My life is cycling. This is what I love doing.

I can't imagine. First of all, I can't imagine being a drug dealer, but I can't imagine doing anything. it would risk the thing in life that I love so much. Sure, hurt the sport, hurt his ability to play the sport. He's bad. He's bad. Yeah.

Right? But when you talk about saying, don't think about the last step, think about the first step. Now, put yourself in Joe's situation. Imagine that cycling was all you love. You finish your undergrad. You're back to cycling. You don't do well. Don't you cry that night?

Yeah, absolutely. I cry that night. Don't you talk to a friend? Yeah. Of course you do. They give you a name for a doctor and a don't you go? Of course you go. The doctor gives you a prescription.

Don't you go to the pharmacy? Well, it's from a doctor. It's from a doctor. There's nothing wrong with. The pharmacy fills it up. Yeah. Don't you take it? Sure.

If you took it, don't you take the first injection? Of course. Think about that stuff. Like, when would you stop? I asked you about what kind of thing does he think would have made him stop? He said if the pharmacy declined his claim. Sure.

But other than that, like when would we have stopped? It's very easy to judge from the outside. And by the way, when you look at criminal behavior, we often see the last point. Sure. Yeah, you see the violent crime and whatever else. Yeah, but the slippery slope is actually an incredibly important thing to do. And, you know, we often look at the first transgression as only it's the first time and it's just the beginning and it's small and it's so on.

The fact is we need to be careful. Yeah. Because it's true, it's the first time. It's true, it's very sad. But it also means there's a chance for a slippery slope and we need to worry about this. So what can we do to reverse the process? Let's say I'm starting to, let's say, man, you know, I'm a little. late because of traffic, but then, man, everybody always believes traffic excuse. So I'm just

going to be late all the time and not care, and I'm always just going to say traffic, and people will be too polite to say anything. And, well, if I can lie about that, why don't I just lie to somebody else about this other thing? How do I catch myself, or how do I catch others before it's too late? Is there a way to reverse this process, because it seems to get easier, as she said? Yeah. So first of all, the sad thing is we don't have a slippery improvement. No slippery upward climb. Not a slipper up. For an upward climb, what you need to do is you need to have a decision point and fresh page.

There's no, oh, I'm lying up to now, you know, three times a week about being late. Every month, improve it by 10%. Right. There's nothing like that. What you need to do is create a rule that say this is not the right behavior and from now. Now, there is a group of people who are trying to be radically honest. The movement started in Germany.

That sounds about right. I'm not sure I want to be married to somebody who told me the absolute truth all the time. Your shoes are ugly. But I think we do need to figure out what are the important things in life where we need to regulate ourselves

and how do we do things there. So as a university professor, there's all kinds of places where I could create serious conflicts of interest for myself. Sure. Yeah. Can my students work on a project that I get to do some outside of the university activity? Interesting. So I told you about the startup. It would have been fun to take my students and get them to work on this project, but it creates conflicts of interest. So I decided not to. I was asked to be an expert witness in a class action lawsuit. Oh, wow. They pay lots of money.

Sure. I decided to do it only if I would do it for free. Really? That must have been really. thrilled to have you on board for free. Well, I asked them to donate the money. Oh, good, okay. So, make those guys pay. Yeah, there's no reason not to get them to pay, but I picked a charity and I said, please pass the money to the charity.

Now, that was an expensive decision. Sure. Because it took me some time and the money could have gone to me, to went to this charity, which I was very happy about, but, you know, still, it's an expensive decision. But I said to myself,

I don't want to be paid to have an opinion. Why? Because I know how corrosive conflicts of interest are. Right, so that opinion could have been modified by the fact that you got a check for 30 grand sitting in your bad pocket. Look, one of the best investments in the U.S.,

the best investment, is lobbying. Oh, yeah, well. And you know why? Because people are cheap. So you can buy somebody a beer and a sandwich or maybe a steak or fish. Vegetable. Yeah, it depends on their diet.

Anyway, you can buy somebody a beer and all of a sudden they start looking at life from your perspective. Sure. And you know what? It's a beautiful thing. Why is it a beautiful thing? Because the two of us can meet,

we can have a beer, and we start liking each other better. And it's a wonderful thing on the social realm. Right. Do you want to mix it with lobbying? Not so much. I don't want somebody else

making a decision on my behalf because somebody else bought them a beer. On taxpayers behind it because somebody bought them a beer. So conflicts of interest are one of those things that are incredibly corrosive, but we don't see it. I mean, think about yourself.

Do you see how you are biased by some conflicts of interest very hard to, to see it. It's tough. And I have to look at these things with a very sober eye. And also, sometimes my fiancee now, she'll say something like, maybe you should look at it this other way. And you don't want to look at it that way because you'd rather cash the check. You'd rather do it your way instead of thinking, well, how other people's feelings or their business might be affected by it. It's hard. So I decided as I was doing this research on this honesty and as I was

starting to understand the corrosive effects of conflicts of Finfest, I decided to try and reduce the conflicts of Infest in my life. And there's two parts. It's like, what are the cases where I could have a conflicts of interest? Yeah. Somebody pays me to have an opinion or a company is hiring me. And then on the other side, I was trying to think about the people who are service providers for me, financial advisors, physician, dentist, and so on. Right.

They have a conflict of interest and how do I try to reduce that? Yeah, that's always scary. Right. Very scary. By the way, it's very tough to go to your doctor and ask them, I think, I think, you know, you have a conflicts of interest, I would like a second opinion. It is such a violation of trust.

It is. You're basically saying, and there's no way to say, it's not you, it's just human nature. I think everybody is. Look, everybody is trying to kill me with drug prescriptions that I don't need, so I'm just gonna ask another doctor. But I really want to know your,

tell me which drug company has paid you recently to have an opinion, or it's a terrible situation. And we're really very unpleasant, right? It's very unpleasant to go to a doctor and to keep in your mind the fact that their recommendations, and what you will take will have an impact on their financial outcome.

And to realize that it's not that they're bad people, but they could be biased by that, and you might be the one paying the bill for their biases. Yeah, it's a terrible, it's a very unpleasant thought, but I think it's also true. Yeah, it has to be because doctors are human and if they share all the same thoughts,

which they do, then it's true. And you know, and you see it, I mean, you see that when you go to surgeons, they recommend surgery, you go to, I mean, everybody recommends what they get to benefit from. Yeah, and then even if they're blind to that, right? Like, oh, you should definitely get the surgery.

And another doctor says, well, I would only do that under these conditions. But meanwhile, they're trying to throw you off under the knife right then. And again, it's not because they're saying, oh, let me charge this person a bit more. Right. It's because if you get paid for surgery, everybody seems like a surgical case. Right. What's that expression when you're... If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Yeah, I always get that wrong, but that's exactly what I was looking for. So this question has been sort of gnawing at me since you'd mentioned that cheating is behavioral. Do you think it's cultural? Do you think it's human or do you think it's a combination of both? So it is both. So first of all, let me tell you how we measure dishonesty. So we give people a die, like a regular six-sided die. And we say, why don't you throw this die and we'll give you whatever it comes up on? Comes on one, we'll give you $1, $1, $2, 2, 3, 3, and so on. You can get paid based on the top side or the bottom side. Top or bottom, you decide, but don't tell us.

So if you were in the experiment, I would say, please think top or bottom, but don't tell me. You have it. Okay. Keep it in mind. Now roll the die. When you roll the die, it comes with five on the bottom and two on the top. And now I say, what did you pick?

Right. Now, if you pick bottom, you say bottom and you get $5. No problem. If you happen to pick top, now you have a dilemma. Do you say the truth, top and get $2? Or do you change your mind and you say bottom and get $5. And people do this 20 times. Every time they think top or bottom, they decide,

They roll, they see what happened, they tell us what they chose, and you run these experiments, you see that people are unbelievably lucky. Yeah, much higher than chance. You must higher than chance. You know, people don't get 20 out of 20, but they get 13 or 14, right?

So people cheat a little bit. Luck has a nice feature of focusing on the 6-1 diatosis. These are the ones that people get it more right than the 3-4-1, and that one, somehow lack doesn't care so much. So we run these experts. We tried them in many countries. I grew up in Israel, I tried Israel,

Israel is she just like the Americans. See, that's good to know. I lived in Israel for a while, and I'll tell you, a lot of my Americanisms did not go over well. Like, hi, how are you? You don't care why are you asking me. Tough neighborhood, right?

Yeah, that's a episode. So we'll come back to this, but Francesca Gino, my Italian collaborator, said, come to Italy, we'll show you what the Italians can do. What cheating looks like? Just the same. We tried Turkey, China, Germany, Portugal,

South Africa, Kenya, we tried Colombia, Japan. Anyway, we tried lots of places. What about Russia? We did not try Russia. We did try England and we did try Canada because the Canadians always think that they're better than everybody else.

They're not. Good. You hear that Canada? But here's the thing. I mean, you've traveled to lots of places. You know that this honesty feels very different in different places. How can it be that we don't find a difference?

And this is an important point about social science. It's a task about cheating, but it's an abstract general task. It's something that people have not encountered before. It's not embedded in their culture. So because of that, that task is checking the basic human ability to cheat a little bit and feel good about it. And from that perspective, we're all the same.

Just because you're born Japanese or German or American doesn't change your ability to rationalize small dishonesty. Interesting. That's true, but it doesn't mean that, culture doesn't matter. In what way culture matters? Culture doesn't change you as a human being. Culture change you in a domain-by-domain-specific way.

When I ask my students, how many of them have illegally downloaded music on their computers? Right. Everybody would admit that I would imagine it. They don't seem to be ashamed. They know it's illegal. Ask them about illegal downloads. It's not as if they don't know. Now, does that mean that they are corrupt as human beings?

No. What it means is they took this one activity, which is called illegal downloads and said this is not a moral question. This is how we do think. I deserve the new Beyonce out. Somehow this. And actually I talked to a mobster

which was very interesting. Now in his life, he did lots of terrible things. And you could think that he has no morals, but that wasn't true. He had two types of lives. He has life within the family and outside of the family.

Outside of the family, it was just about maximizing wealth. there was no honor, there was no morality, it was just about cheating as much as possible, assuming he can get away. Inside of the family, he had very strict morals. His handshake was his handshake was his handshake, his word was his word, there was very strict rules.

Now, that's kind of an extreme case, but this is what culture does. Culture takes domains of life and say, this is not a moral. So for example, even bribing, different places in the world feel differently about who you bribe. In South Africa, for example,

it's perfectly fine to bribe a policeman who catches you speeding. Really? People actually talk over dinner about how little money they had to spend to get their way with it, right? It's kind of a point of bragging. In Kenya, it seems to be quite fine

to bribe municipality. Culture does matter, but the way culture matters, it doesn't change who we are. It changes how we apply to specific domains in life. Right, it doesn't change the degree. it just changes where we apply it.

Think about infidelity. If you remember when Mitterrand, the French president passed away, his mistress was at his state funeral with their illegitimate child. Oh my goodness. Now, imagine the U.S. Yeah, that just, so on like,

it would be front page news. Who will show up to Clinton's state funeral when he passed? Probably not Monica Lewinsky, yeah. But, you know, if you think about this, it's, are we more moral than the French in general? No, but are, there's some areas in life when we at least outside have very different rules about what

behavior is like something. That's how culture matters. Culture is a, it's not a backbone change to humanity. It's a way that we apply our understanding about what's acceptable in specific domains. People in startups. We talk about dishonesty. I ask lots of people about how they decide what a user is, people in startup, how many users we have and what's an active user, what do we call this. It's how you get investment. It is a party of this honesty. I'm sure.

But they all know it and they all kind of have rules about how it's actually okay in that domain to exaggerate in all kinds of. By the way, it's terrible for the industry, right? Because you have to inflate. It's like a recommendation letter from college. But if everybody inflates, that nobody trusts these numbers. So it destroys the whole thing. But anyway, think about that as a general rule, not just about this honesty, is that

deep down we're similar, but culture gives us rules to how to apply our decision-making in different domains separately. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dan Ariely. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. To learn more about the deals you've just heard and to get them all in one place, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals has the advertisers and all the codes. Don't forget, we've got that worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

Now, for the conclusion of our episode with Dan Ariely. Now, this is all behavioral economics. How did you get interested in this field in the first place? My initial interest was not so much in behavioral economics, but I was badly injured when I was 18,

and I was in hospital for a very, very long time, about three years, and there were all kinds of things in hospital that I just didn't like. One of them was the process of bandage removal, but there's lots of things that the nurses and doctors did to me that I thought were just wrong. When I left the hospital, I did some

experiments on pain, I did some other things. I found all kinds of ways in which the intuition of the nurses and doctors were just not the right ones. And I thought about, you know, you have to take the bandages of burn patients or you have to give people medications for pain or you do all kinds of things. What are the places where we don't have a good model of the world? We operate as if we know how the world works, but because our model is wrong, we inflict more pain and increase suffering. And I think it's true for lots of things, right? There's lots of things that we just don't understand how the world works.

And because of that, we just create more misery in the world. So think about how we waste our time, think about how we waste our money, how we waste our health. What is our understanding? Think about something like food. There's this very basic belief that if we only told people how much calories are in different dishes, People would eat better. And that has not happened. You know what?

It turns out it doesn't matter. Actually, so we did this experiment with Panda Express. You know Panda Express? I do, yeah. I've eaten there a couple of times because I went to college and never again. It's fast food Chinese food, essentially.

It's fast food Chinese food. They mostly sell something called orange chicken. Orange chicken? Orange chicken. And orange chicken is fried twice. It has salt. And it's incredibly unhealthy and incredibly tasty at the same time.

It is delicious. They probably put crack in there. We did a study with them. in which we put calorie labeling on every item in the menu. What happened? Absolutely nothing. Nothing, yeah.

New York City forced every fast food place to put calorie information on the menu. What happened? Basically nothing. By the way, there were a few poor neighborhoods where people started eating worse. Why? Because they saw this table of money per calorie

and they were trying to maximize calories per dollar. But in general, nothing happened. But we think that the only thing we need to do is to give people information and then people will change behavior. Or think about something called financial literacy. We say, oh, just tell people about money. They'll behave better. Doesn't change habits.

Don't work. From all the good human habits. Like things we do well as Americans. You say, oh, people basically behave well on this. Sure. I think toothbrushing. Yeah, bro. Okay, so really simple stuff.

Washing your hands before you eat, things like that. Washing your hands. Washing hands is not as common. Really? That's kind of gross. Sadly, sadly it's not. But you look at what we do well, we reduce smoking from about 40% to 20%

people wear seat belts. Seat belts, yeah, good call. You look at those things and you say, how many of them are driven by information that we told people, you know, it's dangerous to drive without seatbelt, why don't you do it? And people say, oh, yes, of course.

Or we told people, oh, you know, smoking can kill you and people say, oh, I had no idea, let me change behavior. There's not a single documented case, I think, we're just giving people information help. Think about smoking. Smoking helped by villainizing smokers with secondhand smoke. Yes.

Right? The scientific evidence for secondhand smoke is very tenuous. You have to smoke a lot of it to do this. But by calling something secondhand smoke, we villainized smokers, or we made it feel bad. We increased taxes on cigarettes dramatically and we basically banned it from all kinds of places.

It was not the information, it was not the surgeon general telling you that this is unhealthy. It has to be an emotional thing as well, I think, sometimes. Yeah, and, you know, villainizing people, very, very emotional. Seat belts were annoying beeps in the car,

fines, kids in the back screaming, why don't you have the seatbelt, and also the reminder that you have from the belt. But you look at those behaviors, all of them come about, not about information. They all come from something else. But nevertheless, we keep on having the ideology if we only told people,

people would behave differently. By the way, texting and driving, did you know texting and driving? Of course I did, yeah. Nevertheless, I'm sure you've texted and drove. I don't drive anymore. Even when I'm driving, I won't text and drive because, not just because I'm such a good person,

but because I am so, so distractible. And nothing scares me more than being in the car and then maybe I'm on the speaker phone call or something. Even the speaker phone, the hands free, totally legal, I'm driving and I go, wait a minute, where am I and where am I going? How did I get so far away from, oh man, I made a wrong turn, like four miles ago, if that's happening to me on the hands free, what's going to happen when I'm typing and not even looking at the road?

I know I'm going to get in trouble doing that. But I think most people either don't realize it or they're better drivers than me or some combination of those two tracks. Yeah, I think they're not realizing is probably a bigger one. So it turns out that information just doesn't help, and we need to figure out what are the ways in which we can re-engineer the environments to get people to behave differently. So my interest started with pain because I said, you know,

doctors have these bad intuitions about what would make time in hospital more miserable or less miserable. You were younger, this is your... Yeah, yeah, I was just 18. Over the years, I expanded this. And I thought about all kinds of places in which we don't understand how the world works. And if we understood it a little bit better, we could make us a little bit better. And here's the thing. Look at this.

Think about how many things we have here that overcome our physical limitations. Sure. We have chairs. These are incredibly comfortable chairs. we have light, we have air conditioning. We have all of these things because we realize we need help. There's a teleprompter behind you.

I mean, this place especially is loaded, yeah. What about the mental world? What about the world in which you have to choose health insurance? Or what about the world in which you have to decide how much to save for retirement or what kind of medical treatment? In those world, we somehow assume people are perfectly capable. I am just loving to let you decide

how much you're going to save for retirement. And I'm just going to give you all the options for all the medical procedures and you decide. I mean, you go to a doctor now and you have some illness and they say, who am I to tell you what to do? It's your life. You're the doctor. Here's the medical literature.

You read and you decide what is the right treat. I think we need to understand how complex our mental life is and it's getting all the time more complex. I mean, 50 years ago, how much did you have to know about finance in order to make good financial decisions? Yeah, not much. Not that much. You had defined benefits.

You had a pension. life was rather simple. People didn't live as much after retirement, so you didn't have to save as much. Now it's incredibly complex. So people need more to know more. Life is much more complex and we don't have more time to learn how to be good

and all of those things. My mission is to do kind of good social engineering. Social engineering, common theme of the show. The good perspective is to basically say, let's take our human limitations into account and let's figure out what's the version of the chair Like, you know, we've spent so much time making chairs comfortable. What is the version of the chair to help people figure out how much to save for retirement

and how to trade off happiness now and happiness in the future? And let's figure out what is the version of these things that get people to take their medication on time, get us to eat less, all of those things. And I think there's just a ton of progress to make. And sadly, we're not doing it in the right way. I think we're actually going backward. Why do you think that? Because we're creating a temptation society. So think about what is the goal

of every company that is around you. Their goal is to tempt you to do something that is good for them right now. Right now, yeah. So everybody wants your time, money, and attention right now. Now, you might want to be healthy in 30 years from now. Who else has this motivation? Maybe your mother, maybe Jenny.

But mostly the entities that surround you have a very different interest in mind and they control the environment. So Dunkin' Donuts is trying to you to be, get you to eat one more donuts today. Yeah. And Facebook. They're doing a great job of that, by the way.

And Facebook is trying to get you to log into Facebook a few more times a day. Also knocking it out of the park. Yeah, really killing it. And we're kind of slightly helpless because they control our environment. And we make decisions that are partially based on our environment and they design the environment with their short-term interest in mind, not our long-term interest. And we see in the book and predictably irrational, there's so many, interesting examples of the social engineering, both going right and going wrong, from executive

compensation to German judges essentially handing down harsher sentences based on a die roll, which was kind of terrifying. There's so many interesting concepts in here. One thing that I found that was accidentally very apropos is you stated that our expectations excessively influence how we perceive events. Immediately what came to mind was the shootings of unarmed black men from police because of the expectations based on media, based on maybe things that have happened to them in their line of work that are exacerbating this problem. Do you see that pattern?

Absolutely. The work I've done on expectation is mostly around placebo for pain, when people expect the medication to be more helpful, it does become more helpful. When people pay more for medication, it's better. When people think the beer is better or the wine, it's better. But there's all kinds of work on eyewitness testimony where you put people in a,

you put people in the room and they observe a big screen movie of some shooting. And they don't know that there's going to be a shooting and just something happened. And then there's a shooting and people run. And then you take them out and you say, what happened?

And most people see the black guy is the shooter. And it's because we don't have a full video. I mean, we have the experience that we're viewing life as a video, but we don't. We take snapshot. of particular instances,

and then we fill the gaps from our brain, not from reality. We think we see with our eyes, but we really see a lot with our brain, and we think we experience the world with our senses, but a lot of it is done by what's called top-down, that we expect a particular thing, and then we see what we expect to see.

Because of that, by the way, this is not to forgive or to... Excuse, right, any behavior. But if somebody is making a movement, and you think of them as a dead, dancer or you think of them as somebody who might have a gun, you're going to look at that movement in very different ways. You might describe even things like the speed of the movement. You might describe the direction of the movement. We're trying, our brain has an incredible capacity of trying to predict the future all the time and to see whether our predictions

are correct. Right. So you have a sense of what reality is. You're trying to predict what it is. You're not predicting all possible futures. You're predicting one particular future. And then you're you see whether what you're predicting is actually coming into reality. So you get a lot of self-confirming evidence just because that's what you look for, which doesn't excuse prejudice. But it actually says how important it is to eliminate. Because the moment you have prejudice, there's really not much you can do about it. It's very hard if you have prejudice at the moment not to have different interpretations of reality. So we as humans constantly trying to predict that future or that outcome of the future action or something like this is always influenced by our prejudice. How do we do as humans as a whole

when we try to predict things? Are we generally good or are we generally wrong? Well, there's a lot of things that we get wrong in predictions. In most cases, it's not too bad, right? Because I can say, you know, where do I predict you will walk or what do I predict you will say and so on. And if it doesn't that's okay. Yeah, the consequences are minimal. If I all of a sudden have a device that can kill you, I'm looking at how you lean toward me as an aggressive mood rather than you're trying to tie your shoe, now there's a lot of risk. So it depends on the stakes, right? And here's the worst thing, is that the fact that those things are on people's mind all the time actually contribute to the expectation. Sure. With the media and this thing becoming more common, a lot of people were

asking, is this a new epidemic or are we just shedding light on something that's been there the whole time? And the answer is probably it's a little bit of both. But the expectations that somebody's going to be a violent person, it's not coincidental that they happen to look exactly like these other people that had found themselves in the exact same situations over the past few months, past few years. Yeah. It's an incredibly sad, self-reinforcing social phenomenon. Tell us about the new book. Tell us about motivation. pay off. I've done lots of different types of work.

Part of the thing that we actually don't know a lot about, the body of academic knowledge is not that it's large about, is about motivation at the workplace. And the reason for that is that it's just really hard to do. So I can sell some stuff, I can give people painkillers, I can change the prices of the painkillers, I can get people to steal some money from me. But what is really hard to do is to basically change people's bonuses

for six months and see what happens, or to give people large bonuses. Like we gave people a five-month bonus in one experiment, so they could make a tremendous amount of money. This body of work is actually, I think, took advantage of some of the early success we had because office and companies were willing to work with us, right? So I couldn't do things like this without...

Ten years ago, right? Without Intel and Microsoft and, you know, big companies allowing us to run experiments on employees and getting them to have real bonuses and different amounts and different incentive structures. What's so amazing about motivation is that we had this incredible capacity to be motivated by things. When you look at this and you say, people are motivated by the way we help other people and by our sense of progress and by pride and by achievement. If you just wrote the equation for motivation, it would include lots and lots of things.

Mostly, we don't think of any of this. Sometimes we have an intuition about some of them, but we don't think very deeply about motivation. mostly we think about something like, oh, let's just pay people. Now, paying people is fine. I have nothing against paying people, but it doesn't always work. It doesn't always work well. It can sometimes backfire. You can pay something, but some payment methods actually decrease motivation, run increasing.

And the thing about motivation, I think of it like the perpetual motion machine. So in physics, people look for this energy machine that keeps on working and working and working. Motivation is one of those things that if we understand it, everybody benefits. So if you work for me and you're more motivated, I benefit a new benefit. You enjoy work more and I get more value out of this, right? It's not a zero-sum game. There's like the pie can become larger.

So what I'm hoping is that people take a deeper look at motivation. They will think about all of the elements that I try to describe in terms of meaning and sense of completion, identity and so on, and try to figure out and how do we expand the pie, how do we get everybody to benefit from this. Some of the conclusions are really, really interesting. People are nearly twice as productive when their work has meaning, and almost everyone underestimates that effect.

2X is an enormous multiplier by any standard. Imagine if all of your team members were twice as productive, and it didn't necessarily require a doubling of their salary. I mean, this is an economically game-changing. That's right. And this was in a production setting when you can actually measure what people do. You know, there's some jobs like your job, still harder to measure, productivity. And the things that we should be doing and we don't.

don't do, but then there's also the things that we do and we should do. So it's actually quite sad to see how many motivation choking behaviors we have 360 evaluation. Sometimes bonuses. You know, there's a big consulting company I talked to about their bonuses. And I said, you know, I would love to do a study with you about bonuses and well-being and how much bonus people get, what they expect to get, how it works. And the CEO told me that bonus season is the most miserable season in a company. Why? He said, everybody is concerned all the time thinking about what will their bonuses,

what will be their bonuses. Because it's not just the amount of money, it's also an evaluation. And it's a judgment and so on. And he said, I don't want to draw any more attention to bonuses. And I said, look, the whole reason you have bonuses is to draw attention to it. Yeah. It's a recruiting. It's a retention.

But you want people to think about the bonus and work hard and so on. If you tell me that the fact. that you have bonuses is causing people to be less happy, then shouldn't you question bonuses to start with? The whole idea of bonuses is that you want people to behave a certain way. You put a big pile of money in that direction. People would work in that direction. But if all you do is to get people to be distracted

because they keep on thinking, will I make it, will I not? What will Joe make? How much am I? Right. Where do I fall in the hierarchy? Yeah. Is this motivating? Because if nothing else, they're spending lots of time on this activity.

Yeah, one of the executive compensation studies, I guess, that you'd run these experiments, was they experimented with making their compensation totally transparent. And the theory was, all right, if we publish all of this information for these executives, there's going to be sort of a shrinking of this because there's going to be an element of shame attached to it. But what happened instead was everybody got brutally competitive now that they could see each other's salaries and executive compensation ended up going up. Going up, yeah. Because what happened was they did not compare themselves

to the employees within the company. They compared themselves to the other friends, CEOs, at other companies. Right, people that they thought were on their level. I met this guy. He was in charge of compensation in a big bank. I gave a talk on compensation and relativity and comparison. And he said, you know, now that you tell me about this,

he said, I just realized that we have a database where the salaries for everybody is available. Oh, wow. And he said, if that database got leaked, probably everybody but the person at the top would be upset. Would be unhappy, yeah. Because everybody thinks they're a little better

than the idiot, the other idiot. Of course, yeah. And why is the other idiot paying, getting paid more? There was a company I visited that had a 16-point rating approach to their employees, and it was in quarter of percent. And it transcended into a bonus,

and the total bonus was something like $4,000. So if you had 16 points, you could get $4,000. But, you know, the jump between, 14.25 to 14.5 was not a big financial issue. And people were unbelievably upset over a quarter of a point difference. Why? Because you're judging. Hierarchy.

You're judging me. Like, if you got 14 and a half and I got 14.5 and I got 14 points in a quarter, why are you better than me? It's exactly it, yeah. It says you're better than me objectively on this scale. That's right. And I cannot have that. That's right.

So we can think about all the ways in which we could increase motivation, but the easier one is to first say, let's not do the things that kill motivation. And that should be kind of step one is let's look carefully about what we're doing and make sure we don't do the bad things. Why aren't we good at predicting our own motivations or our own motivation killers?

So there's actually lots of things that come with it, but one of the things is that the experience of flow or the experience of joy at work is a very different experience than a thoughtful experience about what motivates us. What you're trying to do is you're trying to think about this engaged process. And this engaged process is actually about not thinking about it. The engaged process is about saying, I love what I'm doing,

I'm really enjoying it, I'm in the flow, I don't want this to stop. When you reason about that, we don't understand what that includes. So we say, oh, I need more money. But the fact is that for you to be fully engross in what you're doing and derive joy at the moment, it actually means not thinking about work. But when you think about work, you think about work, so you're kind of in a different state of mind.

Right, right, sure. It's as if you're trying to, when you're awake, it's very hard to predict what's happening when you're asleep, and when you're asleep is hard to predict when you're awake. We engage this process of trying to deliberately thinking about what's going on in a state that is so different from the state that we're in, that we don't have good intuition about that.

Right. So all we can look at our patterns, like, well, I know when I go to this place and I'm hungry, I order too many things. But that's kind of as advanced as we get. That's right. And we don't notice a lot of the nuances as well, right? So when you say, how much do you order,

we have a record of this. But when you say motivation also varies and fluctuates and we don't have enough experience over it. Like ordering food, you order multiple time. You have experience. But with motivation, you would need to have lots of variations. So we also don't have lots of experience. Now, if you think about it, to get good understanding of motivation,

you have to try lots in different workplaces over a very long time and then be able to attribute how motivated you were to this condition. So this is why human bias as well, right? And this is why research is so good, right? Because with research, you say, I don't expect you as individuals to collect all this data. I know you used to do lots of things on dating. Dating is one of the things people have terrible intuitions.

Yes, of course. Because how many people have you dated? I mean, if you dated a lot, it's a dozen. I mean, how many people have you lived with for a prolonged period of time? Very, very few. How would you develop an intuition about what works well or not? You would have to date lots of people, try different approaches,

see what works, it doesn't work. We don't have that luxury. Even if you were able to do that for yourself, you then have to go, here's what's going to work for you based on my experience. First, you have to get decades and decades of experience, and then you have to show what's going to work for other people, and that's just as hard.

Yeah. And if you think about compensation or motivation in the workplace, these experiments are just very hard. They take lots of time, they require lots of efforts, very hard to do individually. And, you know, every company has an ideology about what compensation should be like and what motivation. And it's not just about companies,

it's about organizations and families. Everything has the notion of motivation. and everybody has ideas about it. But when you ask people, how sure are you that your ideas are working and there's any evidence for this, nobody does. Dan, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you want to make sure you deliver?

I think that we used to think that the big mysteries of life is, you know, what's in the stars and maybe microbiology and of course these are big mysteries. But for me, I think that the human mystery is wonderful. And even though it's just in front of us, there's so much we don't know.

We drink coffee every day. the truth is there's lots of things we don't understand about coffee. We use money every day, lots of things we don't understand about it. We try to motivate people every day and we don't still understand what it is. And the process of social science

in which we try different things and try to measure objectively what's going on and attributing and trying to improve things over time, I think it's a wonderful process. So when people read or listen or think about those topics, I think the real benefit is to say

what can I take for my life? What are the things about my life that I'm not observing? Can I be a bit better in observing my own life? Can I try to implement something? And then hopefully also can I try to experiment with something? Is there something I would like to try out in a few different ways and see what leads to a better outcome? Thanks so much, Dan.

My pleasure. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a little dive into my conversation with writer Arthur Brooks. This one was popular when it first aired, and Arthur's wisdom on how to have hard conversations with those close to us is more pertinent than ever these days. Here's a quick preview.

Anytime you catch yourself comparing yourself to others, you have to stop and say that's what I'm doing. Don't do that. Oh, God, easier said than done. Yeah, I know. But although once you know that, the knowledge is power. I was just at a bachelor party, and some of my friends were like, oh, man,

some of our friends, they just became like high school teachers. And I was like, well, let me stop you right there. You know how happy those people are? They figured out what they wanted to do when they were like 24. They got married to somebody they'd been dating for a while. had kids well before age 30. They're satisfied with what they're doing in a lot of ways. They have way more free time than you and I.

We cannot sit back and judge. We're wired in a way that we're always dissatisfied. They're wired in a way where that is fine. I'm jealous of that on many levels. One in six Americans have actually stopped talking to a family member because of the election. That's pretty scary. It's almost one in five now. Yeah.

Politics has become super, you know, hyperattenuated in our culture where it's taken on this outsized role and importance to assume ad hominem. This is what you were saying. It's like, Jordan made this joke on Instagram. So therefore, I know what's residing in the depths of his heart. I bet you he bears animus towards some racial groups. So wildly, but that's exactly what we're talking about, motive attribution asymmetry on the basis of ad hominum.

Don't be that guy. 93% of us wish the country were more united. You're part of the problem when you do that. So I got a win, win, win, win proposition. for our listeners and viewers today. Number one is I'm going to make you more persuasive. I'm going to make you happier. And I'm going to start a social movement in your heart

in a tiny little way to bring our country together. And that's answering hatred with love as much as you possibly can. For a great discussion on how we can bridge the divide in our relationships, our country, and even within our families, check out episode 211 with Arthur Brooks here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Big thanks to Dan. His books will be listed in the show notes. He's got plenty of them.

They're all good. Please use our website links if you buy the book. It does help support the show. Worksheets for this episode in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. There's a video of this interview coming on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn.

I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course. That's free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

My amazing team includes Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Rob Fogre, Ian Baird, Millie O'Campo, Josh Ballard, and Gabe Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who loves the reasons why we do things, behavioral economics, psychology, share this episode with them. Hopefully you find something great in every episode of this show, so please do share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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