Dan Ariely
Biographic Data
| ID | 100034 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan Ariely |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan |
| FAMILY NAME | Ariely |
| SIGNATURE | ARIELY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6175-4151 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 382 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Effectiveness of Ex-Ante Honesty Oaths in Reducing Dishonesty Depends on Content
Dishonest behaviors such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex-ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behavior, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated, and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a m…
Navigating uncertainty
In an era of transformation fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), human resistance to adopt this powerful technology has emerged as one of its most critical barriers. In a series of four studies involving almost 4,000 consumers, this research explores factors that contribute to consumer reluctance toward AI through theories related to algorithm aversion, decision-making under risk, and compensatory decision-making. The results underscore the im…
How pledges reduce dishonesty
Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content
Does Real Age Feedback Really Motivate Us to Change our Lifestyle? Results from an Online Experiment
We set out to research the causal impact of Real Age feedback, a popular tool on health and lifestyle platforms, on health behaviors. We ran an online experiment where participants were randomly assigned a Real Age that differed in both direction (older or younger) and magnitude (much or slightly) from their passport age, or to a control condition where they received no Real Age feedback. We measured the impact of Real Age feedback on motivation …
On the interplay between pain observation, guilt and shame proneness and honesty
Seeing others in pain can stimulate powerful socio-emotional responses. Does it also make us more moral? In two laboratory experiments, we examined the interplay between pain observation, self-reported guilt and shame, subjective perceptions of pain intensity, and subsequent honest behavior. Watching a confederate perform a moderately painful (vs. non-painful) task did not affect honest behavior in a subsequent die-roll task. Independent of pain …
Harnessing dehumanization theory, modern media, and an intervention tournament to reduce support for retributive war crimes
We demonstrate how psychological scientists can curate rich-yet-accessible media to intervene on conflict-escalating attitudes during the earliest stages of violent conflicts. Although wartime atrocities all-too-often ignite destructive cycles of tit-for-tat war crimes, powerful third parties can de-escalate the bloodshed. Therefore, following Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, we aimed to reduce Americans' support for committing retributive w…
A field study of the impacts of workplace diversity on the recruitment of minority group members
Increasing workplace diversity is a common goal. Given research showing that minority applicants anticipate better treatment in diverse workplaces, we ran a field experiment (N = 1,585 applicants, N = 31,928 website visitors) exploring how subtle organizational diversity cues affected applicant behaviour. Potential applicants viewed a company with varying levels of racial/ethnic or gender diversity. There was little evidence that racial/ethnic or…
Morality in the time of cognitive famine
Though human social interaction in general seems effortless at times, successful engagement in collaborative or exploitative social interaction requires the availability of cognitive resources. Research on Dual-Process suggests that two systems, the affective (non-reflective) and the cognitive (reflective), are responsible for different types of reasoning. Nevertheless, the evidence on which system leads to what type of behavioral outcome, in ter…
Eliciting preferences for redistribution across domains
People's preferences for redistribution are a key component of redistributive policy design, yet how to elicit these preferences is still a matter of debate. We recruited a nationally representative sample of more than 5000 US respondents. We used an approach based on principles of justice to elicit people's preferences for redistribution across different domains. We compared people's preferences for the distribution of wealth, good educational r…
The Limits of Cognitive Reappraisal
Physiological discomfort is commonly cited as a barrier for initiating and persisting with exercise. Although individuals may think of physiological discomfort as determined by physical sensations, it can also be influenced by cognitive and emotional factors. We explored the impacts of interpreting the purpose of pain as a sign of muscle building (helpful) vs. a sign of muscle tearing and possible injury (harmful) and tested the effect of cogniti…
Naïve models of dietary splurges
The Sticky Anchor Hypothesis
Self‐control depletion has been linked both to increased selfish behavior and increased susceptibility to situational cues. The present research tested two competing hypotheses about the consequence of depletion by measuring how people allocate rewards between themselves and another person. Seven experiments analyzed behavior in standard dictator games and reverse dictator games, settings in which participants could take money from another person…
The effects of extreme rituals on moral behavior
Dishonest Behavior
The Valjean effect
Visceral states like thirst, hunger, and fatigue can alter motivations, predictions, and even memory. Across 3 studies, we demonstrate that such "hot" states can also shift moral standards and increase dishonest behavior. Compared to participants who had just eaten or who had not yet exercised, hungry and thirsty participants were more likely to behave dishonestly to win a prize. Consistent with the specificity of motivation that is characteristi…
Cut From the Same Cloth
Norms for dishonest behaviors vary across societies, but whether this variation is related to differences in individuals' core tendencies toward dishonesty is unknown. We compare individual dishonesty on a novel task across 10 participant samples from five countries varying in corruption and cultural values. In each country, a die-rolling task was administered to students at major public universities and the general public in coffee shops. A sepa…
Behavioral Economics
Standard economic models portray decision makers as perfectly rational agents who act selfishly to maximize their total earnings. In contrast, ample evidence in behavioral research suggests that people systematically deviate from the extreme rational assumption of such economic models. Behavioral economics is aimed at identifying the forces which shape the economic decisions that people make, in order to provide important insights of the human na…
Ethical dissonance, justifications, and moral behavior
Public and Private Values
In this paper, we experimentally examine whether looking at other people's pricing decisions is a type of a decision rule that people over‐apply even when it is not applicable, as in the case of private‐value goods. In Study 1, we find evidence that this is indeed the case—individual valuation of a subjective experience under full information, elicited using incentive compatible mechanism, is highly influenced by values of others. In Study 2, we …
L'argent ne motive qu'à court terme
Ego depletion decreases trust in economic decision making
Self-serving altruism? The lure of unethical actions that benefit others
True Context‐dependent Preferences? The Causes of Market‐dependent Valuations
A central assumption of neoclassical economics is that reservation prices for familiar products express people's true preferences for these products; that is, they represent the total benefit that a good confers to the consumers and are, thus, independent of actual prices in the market. Nevertheless, a vast amount of research has shown that valuations can be sensitive to other salient prices, particularly when individuals are explicitly anchored …
Focused on fairness
The heat of the moment
Despite the social importance of decisions taken in the “heat of the moment,” very little research has examined the effect of sexual arousal on judgment and decision making. Here we examine the effect of sexual arousal, induced by self‐stimulation, on judgments and hypothetical decisions made by male college students. Students were assigned to be in either a state of sexual arousal or a neutral state and were asked to: (1) indicate how appealing …
The dark side of creativity
Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals' ability to justify their behavior, which, in turn, leads to unethical behavior. In 5 studies, we show that participants with creative personalities tended to cheat more than less creative individuals and that dispositional…
Too tired to tell the truth
Sequential Choice in Group Settings
Many individual decisions take place in a group context wherein group members voice their choices sequentially. In this article we examine the impact of this dynamic decision process on individuals' choices and satisfaction with their outcomes. We propose that choices reflect a balancing of two classes of goals: goals that are strictly individual and goals that are triggered by the existence of the group. The latter sometimes results in choices t…
Focusing on the Forgone
We propose that buying- and selling-price estimates reflect a focus on what the consumer forgoes in the potential exchange and that this notion offers insight into the well-known difference between those two types of value assessment. Buyers and sellers differ not simply in their valuation of the same item but also in how they assess the value. Buyers tend to focus on their sentiment toward what they forgo (typically, the expenditure), and buying…
Less is more
The present research shows that although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking. Thus, ambiguity--lacking information about another--leads to liking, whereas familiarity--acquiring more information--can breed contempt. This "less is more" effect is due to the cascading nature of dissimilarity: Once evidence of dissimilarity is encountered, subsequent …
Who Benefits from Religion
Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions
We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model with a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of different process measures (experiment 1), we first established that consumers are less certain of their shopping goals and construe products in less concrete terms when they are in the first (vs. second) stage of the shopping process. T…
Ego depletion decreases trust in economic decision making
Getting off the hedonic treadmill, one step at a time
Cut From the Same Cloth
Norms for dishonest behaviors vary across societies, but whether this variation is related to differences in individuals' core tendencies toward dishonesty is unknown. We compare individual dishonesty on a novel task across 10 participant samples from five countries varying in corruption and cultural values. In each country, a die-rolling task was administered to students at major public universities and the general public in coffee shops. A sepa…
The Impact of Add-On Features on Consumer Product Evaluations
The research presented in this article provides evidence that add-on features sold to enhance a product can be more than just discretionary benefits. We argue that consumers draw inferences from the mere availability of add-ons, which in turn lead to significant changes in the perceived utility of the base good itself. Specifically, we propose that the improvements supplied by add-ons can be classified as either alignable or nonalignable and that…
Hedonic versus informational evaluations
This work examines how people form evaluations of extended experiences that vary in valence and intensity. It is documented that when people retrospectively evaluate such experiences, not all information is weighted equally. Some prior research demonstrates that earlier parts are weighted more than later parts, while other research shows the opposite. In this paper we suggest that differences in evaluation tasks shift the focus to different aspec…
The Sticky Anchor Hypothesis
Self‐control depletion has been linked both to increased selfish behavior and increased susceptibility to situational cues. The present research tested two competing hypotheses about the consequence of depletion by measuring how people allocate rewards between themselves and another person. Seven experiments analyzed behavior in standard dictator games and reverse dictator games, settings in which participants could take money from another person…
True Context‐dependent Preferences? The Causes of Market‐dependent Valuations
A central assumption of neoclassical economics is that reservation prices for familiar products express people's true preferences for these products; that is, they represent the total benefit that a good confers to the consumers and are, thus, independent of actual prices in the market. Nevertheless, a vast amount of research has shown that valuations can be sensitive to other salient prices, particularly when individuals are explicitly anchored …
Less is often more, but not always
Ullrich, Krueger, Brod, and Groschupf (2013)-using a replication of the trait paradigm from Norton, Frost, and Ariely (2007)-suggest that less information does not always equal greater liking. We first ground the current debate in a larger historical debate in social psychology regarding the merits of configural versus algebraic models of person perception. We next review (a) related research that has suggested that more information can in some c…
Does familiarity breed contempt or liking? Comment on Reis, Maniaci, Caprariello, Eastwick, and Finkel (2011)
Reis, Maniaci, Caprariello, Eastwick, and Finkel (see record 2011-04644-001) conducted 2 studies that demonstrate that in certain cases, familiarity can lead to liking--in seeming contrast to the results of our earlier article (see record 2006-23056-008). We believe that Reis et al. (a) utilized paradigms far removed from spontaneous, everyday social interactions that were particularly likely to demonstrate a positive link between familiarity and…
How pledges reduce dishonesty
Harnessing dehumanization theory, modern media, and an intervention tournament to reduce support for retributive war crimes
We demonstrate how psychological scientists can curate rich-yet-accessible media to intervene on conflict-escalating attitudes during the earliest stages of violent conflicts. Although wartime atrocities all-too-often ignite destructive cycles of tit-for-tat war crimes, powerful third parties can de-escalate the bloodshed. Therefore, following Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, we aimed to reduce Americans' support for committing retributive w…
Naïve models of dietary splurges
The effects of extreme rituals on moral behavior
Focused on fairness
Navigating uncertainty
In an era of transformation fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), human resistance to adopt this powerful technology has emerged as one of its most critical barriers. In a series of four studies involving almost 4,000 consumers, this research explores factors that contribute to consumer reluctance toward AI through theories related to algorithm aversion, decision-making under risk, and compensatory decision-making. The results underscore the im…
Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content
Combining experiences over time
Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of various factors on retrospective pain evaluation. The factors examined in Experiment 1 were the rate and pattern of change, the intensity (particularly the final intensity), and the duration of the painful experience. Experiment 2 manipulated these factors and, in addition, examined the effect of continuous (on-line) ratings on the overall retrospective evaluation. The two experiments utili…
Gestalt characteristics of experiences
In this paper we take stock of recent research on how people summarize and evaluate extended experiences. Summary assessments do not simply integrate all the components of the evaluated events, but tend to focus on only a few features (gestalt characteristics). Examples of these defining features include the rate at which the transient state components of the experience become more or less pleasant over its duration, and the intensity of the stat…
On the making of an experience
How do people create overall evaluations for experiences that change in intensity over time? What ‘rules’ do they use for combining such different intensities into single overall evaluations? And what factors influence these integration rules? This paper starts by examining the relationship between the patterns of experiences over time and their overall evaluations. Within this framework, we propose and test the idea that the rules for combining …
Focusing on the Forgone
We propose that buying- and selling-price estimates reflect a focus on what the consumer forgoes in the potential exchange and that this notion offers insight into the well-known difference between those two types of value assessment. Buyers and sellers differ not simply in their valuation of the same item but also in how they assess the value. Buyers tend to focus on their sentiment toward what they forgo (typically, the expenditure), and buying…
Sequential Choice in Group Settings
Many individual decisions take place in a group context wherein group members voice their choices sequentially. In this article we examine the impact of this dynamic decision process on individuals' choices and satisfaction with their outcomes. We propose that choices reflect a balancing of two classes of goals: goals that are strictly individual and goals that are triggered by the existence of the group. The latter sometimes results in choices t…
Beautiful Faces Have Variable Reward Value
Seeing Sets
Sets of similar objects are common occurrences—a crowd of people, a bunch of bananas, a copse of trees, a shelf of books, a line of cars. Each item in the set may be distinct, highly visible, and discriminable. But when we look away from the set, what information do we have? The current article starts to address this question by introducing the idea of a set representation. This idea was tested using two new paradigms: mean discrimination and mem…
Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance
Procrastination is all too familiar to most people. People delay writing up their research (so we hear!), repeatedly declare they will start their diets tomorrow, or postpone until next week doing odd jobs around the house. Yet people also sometimes attempt to control their procrastination by setting deadlines for themselves. In this article, we pose three questions: (a) Are people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to ove…
"Coherent Arbitrariness"
In six experiments we show that initial valuations of familiar products and simple hedonic experiences are strongly inuenced by arbitrary “anchors ” (some-times derived from a person’s social security number). Because subsequent valua-tions are also coherent with respect to salient differences in perceived quality or quantity of these products and experiences, the entire pattern of valuations can easily create an illusion of order, as if it is be…
Effort for Payment
The standard model of labor is one in which individuals trade their time and energy in return for monetary rewards. Building on Fiske's relational theory (1992), we propose that there are two types of markets that determine relationships between effort and payment: monetary and social. We hypothesize that monetary markets are highly sensitive to the magnitude of compensation, whereas social markets are not. This perspective can shed light on the …
Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions
The authors demonstrate that marketing actions, such as pricing, can alter the actual efficacy of products to which they are applied. These placebo effects stem from activation of expectancies about the efficacy of the product, a process that appears not to be conscious. In three experiments, the authors show that consumers who pay a discounted price for a product (e.g., an energy drink thought to increase mental acuity) may derive less actual be…
The heat of the moment
Despite the social importance of decisions taken in the “heat of the moment,” very little research has examined the effect of sexual arousal on judgment and decision making. Here we examine the effect of sexual arousal, induced by self‐stimulation, on judgments and hypothetical decisions made by male college students. Students were assigned to be in either a state of sexual arousal or a neutral state and were asked to: (1) indicate how appealing …
Color Blindness and Interracial Interaction
Two experiments explored the ramifications of endorsing color blindness as a strategy for appearing unprejudiced. In Study 1, Whites proved adept at categorizing faces on the basis of race, but understated their ability to do so. In Study 2, Whites playing the Political Correctness Game—a matching task that requires describing other individuals—were less likely to use race as a descriptor when paired with a Black partner than when paired with a W…
Hedonic versus informational evaluations
This work examines how people form evaluations of extended experiences that vary in valence and intensity. It is documented that when people retrospectively evaluate such experiences, not all information is weighted equally. Some prior research demonstrates that earlier parts are weighted more than later parts, while other research shows the opposite. In this paper we suggest that differences in evaluation tasks shift the focus to different aspec…
Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions
We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model with a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of different process measures (experiment 1), we first established that consumers are less certain of their shopping goals and construe products in less concrete terms when they are in the first (vs. second) stage of the shopping process. T…
Zero as a Special Price
When faced with a choice of selecting one of several available products (or possibly buying nothing), according to standard theoretical perspectives, people will choose the option with the highest cost–benefit difference. However, we propose that decisions about free (zero price) products differ, in that people do not simply subtract costs from benefits but instead they perceive the benefits associated with free products as higher. We test this p…
Less is more
The present research shows that although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking. Thus, ambiguity--lacking information about another--leads to liking, whereas familiarity--acquiring more information--can breed contempt. This "less is more" effect is due to the cascading nature of dissimilarity: Once evidence of dissimilarity is encountered, subsequent …
The Dishonesty of Honest People
People like to think of themselves as honest. However, dishonesty pays—and it often pays well. How do people resolve this tension? This research shows that people behave dishonestly enough to profit but honestly enough to delude themselves of their own integrity. A little bit of dishonesty gives a taste of profit without spoiling a positive self-view. Two mechanisms allow for such self-concept maintenance: inattention to moral standards and categ…
Getting off the hedonic treadmill, one step at a time
Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially
This paper experimentally examines image motivation—the desire to be liked and well regarded by others—as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior due to crowding out of image motivation. Using the unique property of image motivation—its dependency on visibility—we show that image is indeed an important part of the motivation to behave …
Large Stakes and Big Mistakes
Workers in a wide variety of jobs are paid based on performance, which is commonly seen as enhancing effort and productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. However, psychological research suggests that excessive rewards can, in some cases, result in a decline in performance. To test whether very high monetary rewards can decrease performance, we conducted a set of experiments in the U.S. and in India in which subjects worked on different…
Contagion and Differentiation in Unethical Behavior
In a world where encounters with dishonesty are frequent, it is important to know if exposure to other people's unethical behavior can increase or decrease an individual's dishonesty. In Experiment 1 , our confederate cheated ostentatiously by finishing a task impossibly quickly and leaving the room with the maximum reward. In line with social-norms theory, participants' level of unethical behavior increased when the confederate was an in-group m…
Too tired to tell the truth
The Impact of Add-On Features on Consumer Product Evaluations
The research presented in this article provides evidence that add-on features sold to enhance a product can be more than just discretionary benefits. We argue that consumers draw inferences from the mere availability of add-ons, which in turn lead to significant changes in the perceived utility of the base good itself. Specifically, we propose that the improvements supplied by add-ons can be classified as either alignable or nonalignable and that…
Neuromarketing
Psychology (54 works) · Social Psychology (42 works) · Economics (26 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (19 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Cognitive psychology (14 works) · Microeconomics (14 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (13 works)