In the new NBC detective series The Irrational, Jesse L. Martin (Detective Ed Green on Law & Order) plays a world famous psychology professor, modeled closely on Harvard’s Dan Ariely (except for being black), who has not only read every Malcolm Gladwell book, but also all the academic papers cited in Malcolm’s books, who uses his Kahneman & Tversky-style Linda-is-a-feminist-bank-teller awareness of human irrationality to help the police solve murder mysteries. This fictional series is based on Ariely’s 2008 book Predictably Irrational about how he can predict when people are going to behave unpredictably.
Of course, Ariely is currently in the news due to the Data Colada blog pointing out that he appears to have faked the data in one (or more) of his papers.
From a well-written article in the New Yorker:
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
September 30, 2023
An observer said, “We were, like, Holy shit, there are two different people independently faking data on the same paper.”
It appears that both famous professors faked data in the same paper … without telling the other.
The half-bearded behavioral economist Dan Ariely tends to preface discussions of his work—which has inquired into the mechanisms of pain, manipulation, and lies—with a reminder that he comes by both his eccentric facial hair and his academic interests honestly. He tells a version of the story in the introduction to his breezy first book, “Predictably Irrational,” a patchwork of marketing advice and cerebral self-help. One afternoon in Israel, Ariely—an “18-year-old military trainee,” according to the Times—was nearly incinerated. “An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns,” he writes. He spent three years in the hospital … “Predictably Irrational,” which was published in 2008, was an instant airport-book classic, and augured an extraordinarily successful career for Ariely as an enigmatic swami of the but-actually circuit. …
He liked to say that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning Israeli American psychologist, had pointed him in this direction. In the previous twenty years, Kahneman and his partner, Amos Tversky, had pioneered the field of “judgment and decision-making,” which revealed the rational-actor model of neoclassical economics to be a convenient fiction. … Ariely, a wily character with a vivid origin story, presented himself as the natural heir to this new science of human folly. In 1998, with his pick of choice appointments, he accepted a position at M.I.T. Despite having little training in economics, he seemed poised to help renovate the profession. “In Dan’s early days, he was the most celebrated young intellectual academic,” a senior figure in the discipline told me. “I wouldn’t say he was known for being super careful, but he had a reputation as a serious scientist, and was considered the future of the field.” …
Ariely came to owe his reputation to his work on dishonesty. He offered commentary in documentaries on Elizabeth Holmes and pontificated about Enron. As Remy Levin, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, told me, “People often go into this field to study their own inner demons. If you feel bad about time management, you study time inconsistency and procrastination. If you’ve had issues with fear or trauma, you study risk-taking.” …
A decade or so into his career, Ariely’s focus shifted to applied research. A former affiliate told me that Ariely once said, “Some behavioral economist is going to win the Nobel Prize—what do I have to do to be in contention?” (Ariely denies wondering whether he would get the Nobel Prize.) In the spring of 2007, he asked an insurance company if he could replace its ordinary automobile-policy review form with experimental versions of his own. Customers had an incentive to underreport their annual mileage, in order to pay lower premiums. Half the participants were to receive a form that asked them to sign an honesty declaration at the end. The other half were to receive an alternate version, which instructed them to sign a pledge at the beginning. The following year, on his first book tour, Ariely addressed a crowd at Google, where he was later contracted to advise on a behavioral-science project, and referred in passing to the experiment’s results. Those who signed at the beginning, he said, had been more candid than those who signed at the end. “This was all about decreasing the fudge factor,” he said. In 2009, Ariely noted in the Harvard Business Review that the insurance company had updated its own forms to exploit his finding. He hadn’t yet published the study, which, given its obvious importance, might have seemed peculiar. But, at the time, nothing appeared to indicate that the results weren’t trustworthy.
OK, what I’m fascinated by is why everybody assumes you need a Nobel-trajectory MIT professor to have some empirical evidence on the effect of putting the signature line at the top or the bottom of the form. Having worked for a marketing research firm that employed a lot of ex-academics, the notion that there is some sort of Berlin Wall between the methods of business and the methods of The Science seems silly.
Isn’t it likely that within huge insurance companies there exists some knowledge on the subject? You know, maybe there’s one old guy in charge of devising forms who could tell you, “Yeah, my old boss told me that his old boss tested this back in the 1980s and it turned out that forms with the signature at the bottom [or top, as it may be] worked best overall.”
“People who go through a tragedy like Dan, with his burn—they have an insight into what’s important in life,” the filmmaker Yael Melamede, who collaborated with Ariely on a documentary about dishonesty, told me. “He was very aware of the dangerous desire to make experiments go your way, to bend reality to your benefit.” …
Well, yeah, maybe. Has Ariely ever tested that?
Where Kahneman and Tversky held that we unconsciously trick ourselves into doing the wrong thing, behavioral economists argued that we might, by the same token, be tricked into doing the right thing. In 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein published “Nudge,” which argued for what they called “libertarian paternalism”—the idea that small, benign alterations of our environment might lead to better outcomes. When employees were automatically enrolled in 401(k) programs, twice as many saved for retirement. This simple bureaucratic rearrangement improved a great many lives.
Similarly, why does the notion of setting up defaults to make things easier for users require famous academics? I discovered the Nudge idea about two days into my job in 1986 setting up new personal computers. These days, operating systems come out of the box highly optimized to maximize productivity by non-technical users, but back then not so much.
… In 2017, Thaler won the Nobel Prize for his analysis of “economic decision-making with the aid of insights from psychology.”
About a hundred thousand 1980s personal computer guys deserve that Nobel too for discovering Nudge two decades earlier.
Haaretz once called Ariely “the busiest Israeli in the world.” …
One of his frequent collaborators was Francesca Gino, a rising star in the field. … Ariely and Gino frequently collaborated on dishonesty. … Gino drew admiring notice from those who could not believe her productivity. …
The paper, which was published in 2012, became an event. Signing the honesty pledge at the beginning, Ariely found, reduced cheating by about ten per cent. The Obama Administration included the paper’s findings in an annual White House report. Government bodies in the U.K., Canada, and Guatemala initiated studies to determine whether they should revise their tax forms, and estimated that they might recoup billions of dollars a year.
Follow The Science! What could be more plausible than that a couple of hard-charging professors noticed something that a million white collar workers never noticed over the last 150 years?
… Near the end of Obama’s first term, vast swaths of overly clever behavioral science began to come unstrung. …
There is a propensity to write off such misconduct as a victimless crime. In the spring of 2021, Data Colada was contacted by Zoé Ziani, a recent Ph.D. recipient whose professional trajectory offered an example of the practice’s collateral damage. …
In graduate school, Ziani took up the question of how individuals form and exploit professional networks—such as the ones she had to assemble from nothing. One recent high-profile contribution to the networking literature was a paper by Gino. Some participants had been asked to think of a time they had networked in an “instrumental” way, and then to fill in the blanks for prompts such as “W _ _ H,” “SH _ _ ER,” and “S _ _ P.” These people were more likely to complete the prompts with such cleaning-related words as “WASH,” “SHOWER,” and “SOAP”—in other words, networking made them feel literally unclean.
Ziani found Gino’s results implausible, and assumed that they had been heavily p-hacked. She told me, “This crowd is used to living in a world where you have enough degrees of freedom to do whatever you want and all that matters is that it works beautifully.” But an adviser strongly suggested that Ziani “build on” the paper, which had appeared in a top journal. When she expressed her doubts, the adviser snapped at her, “Don’t ever say that!” Members of Ziani’s dissertation committee couldn’t understand why this nobody of a student was being so truculent. In the end, two of them refused to sign off on her degree if she did not remove criticisms of Gino’s paper from her dissertation. One warned Ziani not to second-guess a professor of Gino’s stature in this way. In an e-mail, the adviser wrote, “Academic research is like a conversation at a cocktail party. You are storming in, shouting ‘You suck!’”
As Raoul Duke tells Alice from Linen Service, the password is “One hand washes the other.”
… This spring, Harvard finalized a twelve-hundred-page report that found Gino culpable. …
As the Data Colada team members learned more about the insurance paper, they found that it had long had an asterisk attached to it. In February, 2011, at the beginning of the collaboration, Ariely had sent an Excel file with the insurance company’s data to Nina Mazar, a frequent co-author, for analysis. She found that the results pointed in the wrong direction—people who had signed at the beginning were less honest. Ariely responded that, in making “the dataset nicer” for her, he had relabelled the condition names, accidentally switching them in the process. …
The Hartford had, in fact, completed a small pilot study at Ariely’s request, but it hadn’t been fruitful: there was no discernible difference between those who signed at the top and those who signed at the end. The company never updated its forms, as Ariely had claimed. …
Observations for at least fourteen thousand made-up cars were manufactured, presumably, as Data Colada conjectured, with the help of Excel’s random-number generator—the bulk of which appeared in a different font. … The metadata for the Excel file that he sent to Mazar note that it was created, and last edited, by a user named Dan Ariely.
It was probably a guy named Dan Ariely but a different Dan Ariely.
Ariely, with his vaudevillian flair and commitment to provocation, had never been a perfect fit for the academy. Throughout his career, he performed studies that no one else would have had the courage, or the recklessness, to pursue. … In 2005, Ariely ran an experiment at M.I.T. in which electric shocks were administered to Craigslist volunteers, who had been told that they were testing the efficacy of a painkiller. One of the participants was subjected to more than forty shocks of increasing strength, and broke down in tears. She claims that an assistant in a lab coat told her that she would forfeit payment if she backed out. …
He soon agreed—for his own reasons, he said—to leave M.I.T. (A spokesperson for the university declined to comment on personnel matters.) …
In the American press, he has consistently said that he was burned at the age of eighteen, when he presumably would have been in the Israeli Army, by a magnesium flare. In 2008, around the time of the press tour for “Predictably Irrational,” the Times, CNN, and NPR reported that he had been injured in a military exercise, and he never corrected the record. (Ariely said that he has never given inaccurate information about his injury.) But in the Israeli media, which could more easily verify military service, he has said that he was burned in an accident as part of the activities of a youth group. Documents from a court ruling in Israel confirm that the accident occurred in an apartment, where kids were mixing chemicals for a nighttime fire ceremony.
In The Irrational, the Ariely character played by Jesse L. Martin routinely makes up explanations for how his face was burned because he’s hiding that he’s the only survivor of a white nationalist firebombing of his black church that killed 13.
Some observers have complained that Ariely, a charismatic man, has received gentler treatment than Gino. …
Yet some believed that Ariely had always had a tortuous relationship with the truth. When Ariely gained public renown, it seemed as though empirical results became a mere prelude to lively storytelling. The former senior researcher told me that she once heard him talking on the radio about a study his lab had conducted. “His numbers were wrong,” she said. Beyond this, she continued, “he misstates entire findings, he talks about research that doesn’t replicate—he just doesn’t really care that much about the facts. It was, like, ‘No, you can’t make these outrageous claims—you’re a scientist!’”
In other words, he’s a BS artist. He should be a Hollywood producer.
Indeed, he’s now “Consulting Producer” on The Irrational.
The problem with the TV show is that it would be more fun if the main character was the real Dan Ariely: a charming but utterly untrustworthy blowhard.
Now that I think about it, that’s actually a good premise for a detective show. Detectives are typically moral paragons like Columbo or men driven by their code of honor to ends-justify-the-means transgressions of normal regulations like Dirty Harry.
But what if the guy called in to solve the kind of insurance fraud murders (one spouse kills another for that sweet, sweet $115,000 life insurance payout) that are the meat and potatoes of true crime docudramas was just as much of a liar as the suspects? But he’s still, sort of, the good guy because unlike one of them, he doesn’t kill people?
