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 asks you to do something, you simulate in your mind, how happy would you be if the day before they canceled your going to be very busy next year. Just like you are today. Just the details are not written. We understand opportunity cost of time of today like if you ask me to do something else,
A 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 story is 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 expert, each episode turns our guests 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 best-selling.
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 the space. If you haven't heard of them, you're going to
I love this episode and of course if you know who he is, you're going to be excited for this. So I will keep it too much longer but if you're wondering how I managed 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 Jordan. Harbinger.com course, 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. Now, 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 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 is just like this morning. I woke up in jail.
Are you okay? And 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 unflustered yourself, very, very quickly. Otherwise you'll just get washed down, the drain with every little problem that pops up, and there's a couple of versions of the 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
When people try to fall asleep, the interpret. The difficulty as an indication that something is wrong. I'll really go for some it's not just that you fall asleep. You said, 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, in resetting can be in lots of scales. There's this notion called the, what the hell effect? What the hell is that? What the hell? Affected people, mostly know these effects from dieting, right? That you're on a diet. You're on a strict diet and
You ate the muffin, you said yourself? I'm not a diet. I might as well have a burger and fries, right? And the milk, shake for lunch, and then a chocolate cake for the. And the notion is that, we've yourself in the binary way, why the good or bad? And if you're 92% good, you can still think of yourself as a good camera. But if you 78% good, is it really worth effort to move to 92%, right? So yeah, so basically what happened is that as long as we not only good sign, 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, it when people start Behaving Badly continuing is very easy. We find it in dieting, we finally in failing in all kinds of ways and, you know, there are these religious mechanisms that get you to restock these. I think about the Catholic confession. Oh yeah, very well. What's the logic of the Catholic confession Clean? Slate, Detroit. You could say it's a crazy mechanism, right? Because if you know that you can sin and get absorbed
Most what's that you do, right? Just go for it. And not only that, just go for it just before construction, 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 nature. Doesn't count calories by the day that if you ate the 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 exam. Oh yeah, there's all these questions of how do we reset it in? Judaism does therefore toment. So that's all on the dishonesty side but I think it's a much more General thing that if you're in a rut, what can you do to research? And if you you just say, let me reset. I don't think that's going to be a this is going to work, you need some kind of ritual, some kind of statement and then try something different. So
Will you? Yeah and you kind of early in the morning discover the join the rat do something. This. Go for a round. 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 go. Take care of it. Yeah. Clean Slate is interesting. And 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
They cheat and we give them a chance to confess and it turns out that the two elements of confession of the admitting what you've done wrong and asking for forgiveness are both crucial. You need both of them. Hmm. Rising say here is what I did wrong. Sorry. Let me start fresh, those help and, and we don't have enough those mechanism 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's
Russian. Sure. 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. As a surly of going going to be, we have a, I think the intuition is that we are much more continuous self and if we understood that is 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 today. What's your problem, then you go. Okay. Maybe I need to get it back together, it becomes harder. But the way it's not just about other people observing it.
Awareness more generally. So we find for example, that if people work in front of a mirror, there are less dishonest, we find it. If you have, this was an experiment was done in England where they had kind of an honor coffee bar, okay. You have you pay when on your own, you pin your own to tell you what the amount is and they change the pictures above the money collection by, okay? And sometimes it was a picture of eyes and sometimes a picture of flowers and people left
Three times more money, which was a picture of eyes. Now when you see a picture of eyes you don't think yourself. Ooh, somebody's looking right? You don't confuse that this is a camera or something like that. But the reason awareness of the outside perspective, you always want to cut a bit more work to yourself. Think about walking in front of a big display window where you can actually see your Shadow or reflection of yourself. There's an increase awareness of ourselves, and that get us to behave very differently. So, huh?
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 can of delude ourselves very quickly that we are much nicer and sure, healthier. I mean story of everybody's life, right? Listen. How did you eat last week? I was pretty healthy. Well, I'm okay. I went to McDonald's like three times 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 there's right. And the moment you have
Have kind of the outside perspective. View accountability increases. Yeah, a little bit and people behave better. Look at the undergrads, we did some studies on productivity undergrads rarely study in the dorm room. They go to the library. Sure what they go to somewhere public. Why? Because I want to meet girls but probably another reason. So while he is, of course, they think they'll stay in the room to just go to sleep. Yeah, that's accurate. But they also want to have the feeling that somebody might look at the screen.
So if nobody is looking, they can spend the whole day Facebook YouTube and so on. But if the in the library, they have high responsibility to other people around, somebody could pass by, they would feel that they're wasting their 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. Then 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 taken pretty seriously and they don't let just anybody in there. You have to be a certified, you know, bar credit attorney or a student at that law school. You know, undergrads, Etc. So you go into this area, where it's like the ritual is quiet, study, get it done. So if you're there, 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. Yeah. But I'll tell you when I went in there, I kind of wanted to get out of
And so because it was intense and so I got my studying done and I got out of there because otherwise, it was 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 picture of roles. The environment basically reminds us about what our role is in the environment. Gives us all kinds of different hues,
It's time to do the laundry. Make lunch make another land. 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 get up and you 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 two gotten up early and gotten something done. So you just start with the easy.
And then it's five 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 but doing 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 they it, make us feel as if we're making progress. Sure. And the official name for this is structured, procrastination are
Fact, I have that well and it basically kind of the prototype for. This is making to-do lists, right? Yeah. Like is to do list and item. Number one is make it to do it. Yes. 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 from 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 with the hard things.
A very bizarre because they don't give us a sense of the sense of progress is very elusive. Like the Imagine is wanted by that struggle that you go through, to get it done. Yeah, right. And so, first of all, it's a long-term, right? You could spend the whole day and you can say you come home and your significant. I said, what do you do? Say hunting today. I was thinking the whole day. I thought that your job. Nothing good came out right thinking, you know, make all kinds of mistakes. Maybe. I'm thinking a little bit better. No. But you don't feel like it was useful day. Know what did you say? I got to inbox zero. Oh my goodness. Now it's an itchy.
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 for every book I may be edited it, I'm not about riding may be edited it 50 times, right? Will you read it again and rethink about it and change some things and just edit and everything early? The whole thing 50 times? Yeah, about that sounds like an absolutely horrendous amount of work, it's always work, but it's actually quite pleasurable over time. I think I write slower and I
Do it more. That's great for me. It's a bit like I'm not such a good writer, but I know it's a little like wine why 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 that took me a long time and they look at it and I had the thought of like, why didn't they just write this version to start a girl? Why did we have all the other versions? Like why can't there is now imagine
Everything on hard copy, you would have kind of a sense of your progression. Oh you mean like your handwriting? It and then you re handwrite it or because of the, you download recommending. Yeah. But you had the 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 in so on, but in a digital world when we just right on top of other things, and there's no history.
Turi ran for the progress of thought it's much easier to say I should have started here. Sure. Yeah, right. This because you don't actually understand the Journey of thinking, and I think it's one of the problems is that we don't understand how much time thinking takes and how the pure efforts in the pure focusing, and trying to resolve the problem. And think about all the angles actually get you someone else. Sometimes you go in a direction, discovered 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. 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 or the end of your life? Can boxer zero inbox, right? When you get your deathbed, you could say I had two hundred seventy eight days of zero inbox. Yes,
In my lifetime, what an achievement. So we do the Urgent and it's actually a very sad thing. And 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 head. Yeah, I got something. I got something. I have the 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 at the email. Yeah.
You know that what could I do to feel like I've done some were sure, it's not just me of course but we do this. Make work that give us a sense of progress, without delving into the things that actually give us long-term satisfaction. So you basically resting on your laurels resting on your kind of saying this thing has ten steps. The last one is a big one, right. But let's just call them ten steps. You have done five out of the ten. Okay, I'm basically an expert already. The problem is when your laurels are made out of crappy tinsel and plastic.
Okay, and you're supposed to do something Ironclad. You're in trouble, if you're resting on those Laurels. Yep. This is another thing which is called implementation intention. But, you know, if you know, the term, I never heard that implementation intention is the idea that we 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. Hmm, 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 passports who is going to take care of your dog and who will water the plant, right 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. It was selling kind of sandwiches and drinks for lunch so that it was a
Yet. But lunch activity was mostly people coming to buy a sandwich and a drink and people on average were spending six dots and we gave people a coupon that said spend $8 get a dollar off. Okay. And what happened basically we got a lot of people who spend $8 right valuable. There was some people, we gave them a coupon said, spend $4 or more get a dollar off, you know what happened to those people. They spend less why they could have spent six and get it all off, but the $4 kind of get them to think that they should try and aim for $4.
I say 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 the end of the store and some people got it. Once they enter 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're going to get. They knew they were going to get a sandwich at a drink, but with sandwich in, which drink could change hands,
I've thought about it and thought about it. So they got the coupon, the to spend $8, get a dollar off. They said, oh let's spend $8. And then when they got to the counter that was the 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 in a specific drink in mind and then when you give them a coupon it doesn't change their behavior in the same way, huh? So a big part of it is to think about what our couldn't reach 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 going to do it, the question is what kind of things cause us to create concrete plant. Sometimes it's the closeness of the event. In time, like you get close to the sandwich counter, you know, you need to pick right here and up times 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 is if you're making progress but the things that are more difficult, you never.
Forget 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 and say, write book, yes, at the top, and it's been there for three years and it's never getting checked up even page one doesn't. Yeah, 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 as a, you can cross them out. It's right. Then your master, then you 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 under utilizes 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 second yeah 20 minutes or whatever it is, it depends how intense your work is. That's the workout, the 22nd to bought a 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 in those gym memberships, and everything that you've got in, there is an 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 slept 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.
Words rationalize. That that was. Okay. Yeah. In the Congo has all kinds of challenges. I think the calendar is a very it's actually a wonderful but also 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 3 p.m. you're going to meet somebody for this kind of meeting and its really good for that. But if you think about something like working on the book, yes, we can do a hack. We can say every day from 9:00 to 11:00, I'll just book. But shouldn't some days we from 8:30 to 11.
And, you know, we should in 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 a thousand hours, there's no natural way to put it on the counter, right? If you have a task to take three minutes, like, drinking lots of water or calling your mother, it doesn't fit on your calendar either. So the calendar is really optimized for meetings. The only call your mom for three minutes. No 15. But I got it.
But the condo is not good for lots of things now, in strength, is 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 times on 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, 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, well, my goodness. I'm
Free. I've 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 I've had 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? Yeah, I do. I not do that. Yep, and then there's another approach, which is we use the term cancellation. Yeah. This is the, the happiness you get when something
has canceled. So when somebody asks you to do something, you simulate in your mind, how happy? Would you be if the day before they cancel Sprite? And if you're really happy, you don't reschedule it if you can but that's the thing, right? That you're going to be very busy next year. Just like you are today. Just the details are not written so we don't understand the opportunity costs right time. We understand 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 their calendar looks quite free. I the whole day.
All day. Yeah, but the Condor, 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 important to weigh more than the Urgent? And how do we say no? How
Do you 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 everyday and therefore, never get to it, right. Want to make sure I stuck and we need some hacks around the calendar to help us do the some discipline around that. 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 time for that. We
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 this specific times and also see when people did them and not. And then we would over time. Try to schedule in better times and we learn lots of things we learned. For example, that the first two hours of the day are
Generally hours of the people have high cognitive capacity. Really? Yeah, I'm not talking like, 5 a.m. you woke up at -, yeah, it was awful. And I we're not talking five to seven, but 9 to 11 are usually very good hours for people. And if you come to the office at 9:00, and you have kind of high-capacity in the first two hours, you do email and Facebook to tell waste. If you just took the hours that we have high capacity are so precious, you have a few of those day and there's so much more productive than the hours.
The lunch will you can hardly function? Yeah. 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 of your productive and some house, you're not productive. And how do you create priorities and how do you figure out what you put you out? So we, 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
Rennie said, you know what? Read 15 minutes a day. Let's just put it in your calendar. Reach 15 into that helps you fall asleep better and you say you want to read, it's amazing. What you can do in 15 minutes a day. If you do it, if you do it. Yeah. Or writing an average book has, that's 80,000 words. If you wrote a thousand words a day, how many days will it take you to write the book? Three months? It's counting all the editing in the back in the day you took off to do other things. You say? Yes, a few
Words of the, 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 had, it's just paint 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-ruled papers that was 500 words, that's not that much writing email. You 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, BF Skinner the famous
Psychologist. Basically had this rule that you would come to the office and he would write I think 730, words and he would stop on the word 730. Words, middle of a sentence, it 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 in 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 like it to fail,
Yeah, I was, every time I was gonna say, I hope he doesn't say, that's the best way to do it because that's their strategy is not that for me, right? Yeah. But the moment, you have a rule, you basically have taken some decision out of your mind. And actually, there is an interesting story, there's a in Orthodox, Jewish scholar, they call a layout destler. Who said that, if you take all the Jewish people and you ordered them from the least religious person on the left of 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.
Rules that dictate their lives that are outside of their consideration, right? So if your secular person, you have to decide about everything. Yes. What do 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 Gare, you know, that's act care. 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 rabbis. I'm very curious about religion like think about, you know, your interest in startups. What are the most successful? Social institutions out there. Sure. Yeah and I'm using the word successful in its terms of survival, right? In terms of necessarily positive impacts on human life through our religion. Yeah, absolutely clearly, right? Yeah, quietly. What's working? So well, so there's lots of things guilt. There's lots of things about religion. There are complex organizations. But so I asked the chief Rabbi of England and of South
Erica. 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 a Sabbath or not. Exactly really. Yeah. Why. And they both said the same thing. They said, look first of all, you don't need a commandment going out to kill. That's it. You're kind of right? Okay. 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 problems. What we don't see is how much Freedom it gives us.
How much Clarity of mind and rest. And so I want to create this. So I actually try it once a random Sabbath and once on the day of atonement, I don't work on this app. It's not a lot. It's a very interesting process to be in a day that you say, on this day, there is no electronics. Because, usually, when I'm home, no matter what I do, fifteen twenty five percent 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 having all the things you're not answering your
Your phone is off. Maybe all these notification. Who did you respond? It's very hard not to have part of our mind being busy, right? 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 this isn't social agreements about this being an issue. When imagine that every day you considered what they should recycle or not, the recycle how much benefit is giving.
Rice ability is cold outside. It's raining on many days, you will decide not worth it. Absolutely. But if you had a rule that said, good people recycle very different story. Now, every instant is not just about yes or no 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.
Yeah, even more, they help people adhere to those rules. So in the same way, I think that we'd 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 sure 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 will be right
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So are these all
identity-based behaviors, right? So, it's okay. You are a vegan. 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 it Captain America share instead of why don't you want to share? While I don't want to, I want the whole piece of candies. They will 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 you, Savor you a voter, basically all of those things that create identity help. Now, you can have rules with other than, right? You could say every day from 8 to 9. I don't open email. I don't open Facebook. I don't open YouTube. I just right. And you can have a rule like this and you can try to adhere to it. I'm a writer is more powerful. Yeah. But if you want to add to it,
There's all kinds of things you can add in terms of motivation, identities, helpful, public commitment. I mean, there's all kinds of things that you can do to make it more powerful if you're vegetarian. It's kind of funny. I'm a vegetarian at home, the real, 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 the stronger because I'm not a vegetarian, right? But I created two separate context.
I don't do it at home, but when I'm traveling, I have different rules. Whatever. The rule is, whatever is easier, looks tasty. As I'm gonna do you eat? 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
I'll office supply whatever it is you want because that's how we roll here at, I don't know, Apple, NASDAQ, whatever it is. You know, the we go, the extra mile and you can see that in the marketing. But if you could do that with your employees and your team or loyalty, if your talent recruiting, if the people are constantly being recruited away from you, like they are here in Silicon Valley. If you loyalty is the identity that your company has, you might stand a benefit strongly from that as an organization. I'm so people seek identity in many, many ways. And
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'm kind of a strange life, right? I do research and I do research on chocolate and Bionicles and you know, I give people a chance to steal money from me. Anyway, 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. And you know what his life was basically.
And to an interface with sap and the MIT accounting people like, how long did he last an app as well? I wanted to buy a vending machine and they were appalled, like, why do I want the vending machine and was my business? Like, I know. There's anyway, so the guy was just suffering, you know, he was actually an important part of the research process because without them we couldn't have done anything. How you can see that our vending machine, but he also, he also had no idea why he was doing anything that he was doing. So after a while, I started inviting
Into our lab meetings now he was an administrative like his job was to put numbers into an sap form to show the else would push another button and so on that was his job. But I'm inviting to a lab meeting and he was not a PhD student who 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 Israel was very, very different afterward. And I think too often we have kind of the Charlie Chaplin modern days, kind of approach to people who
Work right? People are just doing widget. So people are just kind of flavor 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. If somebody leaves, we could just see no move a little bit of the people around and we all have cubicles and cubicles. I think there's some companies less here as in Silicon Valley but there's some companies that the cubicles people don't even have a the same cubicle every day that was in the book. Well, yeah. I just read about this is that this was in payoff.
The arrows about this, the 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 may never have a picture and you can have nothing right? And it just gives you the notion that you're replaceable. 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. If you've seen it. Yeah. Where they're just pushing coal levers and some sweaty basement somewhere. That's right. And I think that, you know, in the we treat,
Too many people like that. And now 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 continue. If we were any company and we would start bringing testimonials from customers about how their lives
Change 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 that sap rather than listen to some customer talking about how much improvement they got in aspect X, Y or Z and we have these functional view that said let's not waste of time because the real job. What's their obligation is to fill all these forms where I don't think about the fact that they should care about these phones. Yeah, want to do them well and they should want to do them in a way that is improving
Things and they might stay 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 through 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 is the first time I emailed you out of the blue the documentary which will link up in the show notes Here you talked a lot about cheating and lying and I'd love to hear some of the conclusions 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 and 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 first of all is a fascinating film by itself. But it's also wonderful lens to think about almost everything in life. Yeah, because the model we have for this honesty is a cost-benefit analysis, it's a model in which people say what do I stand to gain? What do you stand to lose? Here's
You know, Bodega, how much money do they have? What's the chance? I'll get caught? How much time will I get in prison? And we figure out if that's a good idea, right? Still to rob the place. The reality is that first of all, we don't know. I mean if I ask 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 even a criminal lawyer probably wouldn't have exact idea. So a we don't we don't really know and but also that's not how we think about things instead. What's interesting is we have this internal
About what we feel, good and bad about and what we feel, good and bad about this about our conscience. It's not about outcomes in life. And what's interesting is that it turns out that this honesty is all about rationalizations. It's all about the question of, what can you do and get away with it and not get away with, from the perspective of not being caught. Get away with from the perspective, you know, think of yourself as a bad person. So it's what can you do and still maintain the idea that you're only hearing human?
Being in lots of things help this rationalization. It's always the case about what can you do and still feel that you're okay. And 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 the 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 0. So what happens? No matter how much money you put the machines that everything is changed.
Give you back everything, Kandi, right? So you come in, there's all these buttons, you put your money, you press the button, you get you candy, and all your money back, 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 chronic. So question number one, what percentage of the people called? Probably not that many 0 0. Then, I guess 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, exact. 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 did they take back in with 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. What is right? So, the majority took either three or four. Yeah. That sounds. Nobody hates you, revealing your own level of design now, but nobody took five and it's good. I think.
What they were saying is they were saying something like, I remember this other vending machine, the took my money and didn't give me a candy. This is vending machine Justice Karma. This Karma actually, the only mystery is why you take so long for the world to I should have been back in this for free years ago. That's right, that's right. And that's at the vending machine must have been a close relative of this one. It just, you know, we even if things are. So rationalization is a big part of it and a lot of things help personalization. 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 ah we have the death penalty here. Let's do something else. Unlikely unlikely, the results showed that the death penalty have no effect, no deterrent. If not returned,
Three strikes and you're out no effect, right? Especially, because it's not proportional to the crime. I mean, if you shop list three times and now you're in jail for life. It's ridiculous. But not only is ridiculous. It wasn't a deterrence, right? I didn't even know I had twice already. Let me stop now. Yeah, this is just not how people think how it would be nice if people thought this way, but I got my, my second strike, I really shouldn't steal that that's right. That many candy bars - oh. 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 these wrong model, about how the world works. So in fact, if we understood how the world works from the beginning, we would set up the system in a much better way. So think about Wall Street are they really Psychopaths who are trying to steal our money in 2007-8 and so on? I mean some of those people that I worked with certainly were but I think the majority are
We just people who are one rationalizing, you know, my parents were poor and I was poor growing ups and I'll marry and not just that they say everybody is doing, everybody's doing it and they say nobody true everybody, they know is doing, and they would say things like nobody would buy it, if it's will, doesn't make sense, right? 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, right? So, instead of regarding conflicts of interest with
Treating, the problem is if the real issue is planned dishonesty right? Rather than something that comes from incremental Behavior Design, This is slippery and slippery. Slopes for talking about lying, instead of cheating, like, shifting from from treating, the like 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 total I tried to use is dishonesty instead of lying instead of flying because I think that I would much prefer to describe the
As being dishonest was 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 the right. Let's go.
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, if you don't see much better way to think about it, but my question was just our brain than a Dap. Oh, yea, that dishonesty. Absolutely. And how does it adapt? What are we what's this process? Look like, what are we seeing here? So the brain mostly react to changes, right? So when you move from a outside, the inside,
I didn't beginning. It looks very dark few minutes into it. Your brain is used to it that the station is about the fact that you get used to what you have. Like in the morning. When you put your clothes on you, you knew you were putting them on brand. I was aware you are where I don't do a very great job today but that was aware of what was going to look, lovely. Thank you. But later in the day, you don't notice that anymore. And that's what the brain is supposed to do. It supposed to kind of get us to be neutral at the level of constant activation and just pay attention to things that are deviating, okay, from that and the same thing.
Opens, we'd like the moment of dishonesty. The moment you start acting and dishonest way, it's not a surprising. It just kind of in the back. It's kind of like the light. It becomes a design program, 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
And the answer is, we often don't even know why because we've done it so much, it just didn't know you can 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. 10 minutes later, you put them into separate room and you say, did you lie in these tendons 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
Of the truth. Man, on average people say that the lie between two and three times after you this exercise really know 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. Yeah, terrible should. Be this, white fence. I know. All right. Nailed it on. The example of us little too fast but not the reality is that we have a lot of social niceties for exam. I'm not saying that people get to a room and you know, kind of selling the Brooklyn Bridge email. Yeah, but we have all kinds of things. We
Exaggerated about our GPA and you know if it's an undergrad or we say, nice things about me. This is a part of the social niceties of the world if we can feel 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 him I was late because like you told me today that you were late because there was traffic right now is actually true. How many times in your life? Have you blamed traffic when it
Fact, it was just that you got up too late and started working late. And should I, you know what? I actually as of the past few months and years I never lie about anything consciously. Right? Like as the social lying probably happens but today if I were running late because I got up too late, I probably would have said I got up to it. 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, yes, traffic down. I'm additionally, late because of trying to guess the right, so you know, what would happen if you got that plates? And
It was traffic. We can say I got up late and there was traffic. Now I would have just been. Thank you traffic. Alright. Yes. And we don't catch ourselves doing it because it's kind of such a part of the standard Norm. So and now we're talking about just, you know, white lies and social line 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 or does that not around. Absolutely, it guide that we
For the movie, his name is Joe. Pep, Joe was a cyclist, he was cycling for the u.s. Olympic team, all right, very, very good cyclist. Anyway, cycle 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 has slightly better that night. He cries cycling was all is well, one of his friends, gives him an address and the name of a physician. He goes to see this physician white coat stethoscope.
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, these insurance company pays for it. You only pay the deductible goes back to his room, he takes all kinds of medication, you know, for health, and I mean legal stuff. Right sure. But he also inject this one time that another time. Then another time, they're not designed. Then he discovers everybody in the team, does it then they do it together. Later on. There's a shortage of
Po. But he has friends in the Chinese team. They put him in touch with Factory in China. He Imports EPO is another team hears about it. They asked him to import as well. He's a good guy, he helps them as well. Now, he's a drug dealer. Now is the drug. Think about this story if you talk to Joe, when he was like 19, yeah, 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 having a my life is
Lee. This is what I love doing. I can't imagine first one. Can imagine being a drug dealer, but I can't imagine doing anything. It would risk. The thing in life that I love so much her heart. The sport hurt his ability to play the sport, these bands is better. 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 you cycling was all your love. You finish your undergrad, your 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. Cause you do they give you a name for a doctor and don't you go? First you go. The doctor gives you a prescription. Don't you go to the pharmacy? Well, it's from a doctor is a doctor of 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. Yeah, I 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 yes, by the way, when you look at criminal Behavior, we often see the last Point. Sure. Yeah. Mostly don't file any crime and whatever else. Yeah, but the slippery slope is actually incredibly important thing to do. And you know, we often look at the first transgression is only 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 in here. It's very sad but it also means that the chance for a slippery slope and you need to worry about it. So what can we do to
To reverse the process. Let's see. I'm starting to, let's say, man, you know, I'm 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 lied 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?
Was it seems to get easier. So yeah. So first of all, the sad thing is, we don't have a slippery improvements. No. Slippery upward climb. We problem 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%, there's nothing like that what you need to do is create a rule. Let's say, this is not the right behavior and from now on now
Is a group of people who are trying to be radically honest. The movement started in Germany that sound about, right. I'm not sure I want to be married to somebody who told me the absolute truth is an 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 the project that I get to do some outside of University activity? Interesting. Yeah, 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 decide not I was asked to be an expert witness in a class action lawsuit. Wow, they pay lots of money. Sure, I decide to do it, only, if I would do it for free really, they must have been really thrilled to have you on board for free. Well,
Ask 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 pick the 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 meet 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 to check for 30 grand. Sit in your bed. But look, one of the best investments in the US. The best investment is Lobby. Oh, yeah, well, and you know why? Because people are cheap so you can buy somebody a beer and a sandwich or, you know, maybe steak or fish. Let's vegetable. Yeah. Depends on their diet anyway. You can buy somebody a beer and office and they start looking at life from your perspective. Sure. And you know what, it's a
Beautiful thing. Why is the beautiful thing? Because the two of us can meet, we can have a beer and we start liking each other better. It's a wonderful thing when the social realm, right? Do you want to mix it with lobbying, not. So what? I don't want somebody else making a decision on my behalf, because somebody else bought them appears behind because I'm going to be. 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 say it's tough. And I have to look at these things.
Things with a very sober. I, and also sometimes my fiance. 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 interest and decide to try and reduce the conflict of interest in my life. So in those two parts is like water.
Cases where I could have a conflict of interest. Yeah. Somebody pays me to have an opinion or companies 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 there, is there any conflicts of interest in? How do I try to reduce that? Yeah, that's always scary, right? Very scary. But now it's very tough to go to your doctor and ask them. I think you have a conflict of interest I would like a second opinion.
And it is such a violation of trust. It is right? You're basically saying and there's no way to say this, not you, it's just human nature. I think it. Yeah, everybody is like everybody is trying to kill me with drug prescriptions that I don't need some looking as I really want to know. You tell me which drug company is paid. You recently to have an opinion or terrible situation and we 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
Packed in their financial outcome. Yeah. And to realize that it's not that they're bad people but it could be biased by that and you might be the one paying the bill for their biases. Yeah, it's a terrible is, 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 faults, which they do, then it's true. Yeah. And, you know, and you see it, I mean, you see that, when you go to a surgeon's, they recommend surgery. You go to, I mean, everybody recommends what? Yeah, what they get to benefit from? Yeah, and then even if they're blind,
Blind to that, right? Like I 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 under the knife. Right? Then again, it's not because they're saying, who let me charge this person 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 knowing at
Since you mentioned, the treating 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, let me tell you how we measure dishonest. 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. One comes on one will give you one dollar two, two, three, three and so on you can get paid based on the top side of the bottom side, top a bottom you decide, but don't tell us. So if you're in the experiment, I would say, please think top.
A bottom, but don't tell me. You have it. Okay, keep it in mind. Now, roll the die and you roll the die and comes with 5 on the bottom and two on the top. And now I say, what did you pick up right now? If you picked bottom, you say bottom and you get five dollars, 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 five stars and people do this 20 times and every time they think top or bottom, they decide they roll. They see what happened. They said,
What they chose and you run these experiments. You see that people are unbelievably lucky. All right. Yeah, much higher than chance. You must have a 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 sixth one died doses. Yeah, the ones that get it more, right? And the 341 right? One somehow like doesn't care. So much. So we run these experiments, we try them. In many countries, I grew up in Israel, I tried Israel. Israel cheek 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 you asking me, tough neighborhood, right? Yeah, that's it. I'm sorry. But we'll come back to this. But Francesca genome Italian, collaborators so come to Italy will show you what the Italians can. We were cheating? Looks like just to say we tried turkey, China, Germany, Portugal, South Africa Kenya. We tried Columbia Japan. Anyway, we
Lots of places. What about Russia? We did not try Russia. We did triangle and with each, right Canada because the Canadians always think that they're better than everybody, right? They're not good and here that Canada. But here's the thing, 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. This is an important point about social science. So task about cheating, but in its 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. 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. This on interesting. That's true, but it doesn't mean that culture doesn't matter. In what we culture method culture, doesn't change you as a human being Carl,
Change in a domain by domain specific way. When I ask my students, how many of them have illegally? Download music on their computers, right? Everybody would admit that Vengeance. They don't seem to be ashamed. They know it's illegal asking about illegal downloads, not as if they don't know. Now, does that mean that they are corrupt as human beings? Know what it means is they took this one activity which is called illegal downloads and said, this is not a moral question, pray. This is how we do things that I deserve the
Nubian somehow this and actually I talked to a mobster which was very interesting. Yeah. Now, in his life, he did a lot of terrible things and you could think that he has no morals, but that wasn't true. He had two types of lives here is 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 getting as much as possible. Assuming you can get inside of the family.
Had very strict morals. His handshake was essentially, his world ways were those 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.
Money. They had to spend to get away 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 methods, it doesn't change who we are, right changes how we apply to specific domains in like, writing climate change. The degree just changes where we apply it. Think about infidelity. If you remember, when meteor on the French president passed away, his mistress was at his state.
Rule with their illegitimate child. Oh my goodness. Now, imagine that us. The yeah, that just. So unlike it would be Front Page News who will show up to Clinton's State funeral. Probably not acid, Monica Lewinsky. Yeah. But if you think about this, it's Are we more moral than the French in general? No. But are there some areas in life when we at least outside have very different rules about what behaviors like? So that's how culture methods culture is a, it's not a backbone chain.
Change to humanity. It's a way that we apply our understanding about what's acceptable in specific domains people, in startups know. We talked about dishonesty, I asked lots of people about how they decide, what a user is people inside of how many users we have, and what's an active user. And we call this time, you get investment, that's how you get. It is a party of dishonesty, I'm sure. But they all know it and they all kind of have rules about how it's actually okay in there.
The main to exaggerate in all kinds of, by the way, it's terrible for the industry right here because you have to inflate. It's like a recommendation letter from college. But if everybody inflates that nobody trusts these numbers destroys the whole thing. But anyway, think about that as a general rule not just about dishonesty is that deep down were 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 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 / podcast. Now, for the conclusion of our episode with Dan ariely,
No, 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 Behavior economics, but I was badly injured when I was 18 and I was in hospital for a very, very long time, but three years and they 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. They tell me that I thought were just wrong when I left the hospital I I did some experiments on
And 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. Are you 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
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? Does this very basic belief that if we only told people how much calories are in different dishes, right? Food, it's better and that has not happened. You know what it turns out. It doesn't matter, actually. So we did this experiment.
Permanent with Panda Express, you know, Panda Express I do. Yeah, I've been 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 chili. It's incredibly unhealthy and Incredibly tasty. Anything 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. Yeah.
New York City forced every fast-food place to put calorie information on the menu. What happened basically nothing but the way they were 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 change Behavior or think about something called financial literacy, which they are.
Just tell people about money, they'll behave better doesn't change how it work from all the good human habits, like things we do. Well as Americans that you say, oh people basically behave. Well on this sure we I think toothbrushing the abroad. Okay, so really simple stuff, washing your hands before you eat things like that and walking is not as common. But really that's a girl said, Lisa. You look at what we do well we reduce smoking for about forty percent to 20 percent people were seatbelts but he felt. Yeah, you can look at those things and you say, how many
That are driven by information that we told people. You know, it's dangerous to sit to drive without seat belt. Won't you do it? And it's all yours of course or we told people, you know, it's there is smoking can kill you in because idea 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 there. 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 with really nice smokers or we made it feel bad. We increase taxes on cigarettes dramatically and we basically Bandit from all kinds of places. Yeah, it was not the information, it was not the Surgeon General. Telling this is unhealthy has to be an emotional thing as well. I think sometimes. Yeah. And, you know, villainizing people very, very emotional seatbelts were annoying Beeps. In the car, finds kids in the back screaming, why don't you have
Seatbelt and also the reminder to have from the back, right? 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, right? Even by the way texting and driving. Did you know, texting and driving is dangerous 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
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 speakerphone, the hands-free, totally legal. I'm driving and I go him it. Where am I? Where am I going? How did I get so far away from man? I made a wrong turn like four miles ago if that's happening in me, on the hands-free. What's going to happen when I'm typing and not even look at it but I know I'm gonna get in trouble but I think most people either don't
Realize it or they're better drivers than me or some combination of those two. I think they're not realizing is probably a big one. So 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're okay, doctors have these bad intuitions about what would make time in hospital, more miserable or less miserable? We were younger back. This is your a I was just 18 over the years, I expanded it and I thought about all kinds of places.
Cases in which we don't understand how the world works. And if we understood with 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, you have chairs. These are incredibly comfortable chairs. We have light. We have air conditioning. When we have all of these things because we realize we need help. There's no teleprompter behind it. I mean, this place is, specially is loaded. Yeah. What about the mental world? What about the world in which you have to choose health insurance?
What about the world in which you have to decide how much to save for retirement, or what kind of Medical Treatments that in those world? We somehow assume people are perfectly capable. I am just learning to let you decide how much you're going to save for a Time the. Yeah. 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 the other day, your medical literature, you read and you decide what is Right? Tree, I think we need to
And how complex our mental life isn't, it's getting all the time. More complex, been 50 years ago. How much did you have to know about Finance in order to make good financial decisions here? Now much much you had defined benefits your the pension life is rather simple. People didn't leave as much after retirement. So you have to save as much now, it's incredibly complex, so people need more to know more life is much more complex than we don't have more time to learn how to be good in all of those.
My mission is to do kind of good, social engineering, and social engineering, common thing. I can show the good perspective is to basically say, let's take our human limitations into account and let's figure out. What's the inversion 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 backwards. 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 their goal is to tempt you to do some of these good for them right now, right now. Yeah, 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. I met Jenny. But but it mostly the entities that surround you have a very different interests in mind and they control the environment. So Dunkin Donuts is trying to do to get you to eat one more doughnuts today. Yeah. And Facebook are doing a great job of that back and Facebook is trying to get you to log into Facebook a few more times. Get out of the park. Yeah. Really killing it.
Slightly helpless because they control our environment and we make decisions that are partially based on our environment and they designed the environment with their short term is interested in mind, not our long-term interests 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 he stated that are 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 is? Well, the work I've done on expectation, is mostly around Placebo for pain when
I'll 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 picked up 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 in, just something happen and then there's a shooting in some 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 snap shots of particular instances and then we fill the gaps from our brain, not from reality, right? 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 two, but excuse, right? Anyways, but if somebody is making a movement and you think of them as a dancer or you think of them, as some of you might have a gun, you're going to look at that movement in very different cooking, right? Describe, even things like the speed of the movement, you might describe the direction of the movement, which trying a brain has an incredible capacity of trying to predict the future. All the
I'm 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 reflecting one particular future and then you see whether what you 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 tragedies, but it actually says how important it is to eliminate yet, because the moment you have
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 for 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 purge things? Are we generally good or 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 whatever predict you will say, and so on, and if it doesn't fit, that's okay. Yeah. The contractors are metal. 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 philosophers, the stay. So it depends on the steaks, right? And here's the worst thing is that the fact those things are on people's mind all the time actually contribute to the
Ensure with the media. And this thing becoming more common. A lot of people were asking, is this a new epidemic or we just shedding light on something that's been there. The whole time and answers. 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 phenomena
Tell us about the new book, tell us about motivation and payoff, but then lots of different types of what part of the thing that we actually don't know. A lot about the body of academic knowledge is not that large about is about motivation in 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 painting, as I can get people to steal some money for me. What, what is really hard to do is to
Basically change people's bonuses for six months and see what happens. So to give people large bonuses, like we gave people a five months, bonus in one round 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 sure. So I couldn't do things like this without 10 years ago without Intel and Microsoft and you know big companies allowing us to run experiments on employees.
Getting them to have real bonuses and different amounts and different incentive structure. What someone amazing about motivation is that we had this incredible capacity to be motivated by things. When you look at this, you say people are motivated. By the way, we help other people and by our sense of progress and by pride and by achievement that if you just wrote the equation for motivation, it would include a lot, a lot of things. Mostly we don't think of it. Sometimes we have an intuition about some of them, but we don't,
Think very deeply about motivation. Mostly. We think about something like, let's just pay people now. People is fine. I've nothing against paying people, but doesn't always work, it doesn't always work. Well, it can sometimes backfire, you can pay something but some payment methods actually decreased motivation running with it. And the thing about motivation I think I would like the perpetual motion machine. So in physics, people look for this energy machine that keeps on working working working correctly, 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 bit around your work more and I get more value out, right, 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
D to benefit from this. And 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 a 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 do the things that we should be.
Doing and we don't do but then there's also the things that we do and we should. So it's actually quite sad to see how many motivation choking behaviors. We have 360 evaluation sometimes bonuses, you know, I there's a big consulting company I talk to about their bonuses and I said, you know, I would love to do a study with you about bonuses and well-being how much most people get what they expect to get how it works. And the CEO told me that bonus.
Susan is the most miserable season in a company. Why he said everybody, just concerned all the time thinking about what do Builder bonus, what will be, no bones 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. Right every recruiting to gets a potential. You want people to think about the bonus and work hard and tone if you tell me,
That the fact that you have bonuses is causing people to be less happy than shouldn't you question bonuses to start with the? Yeah, the whole idea of bonuses 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, like make it really not. What will Joe make? How much am I here? Is this motivating because if nothing else, they're spending lots of time on this activity.
Yeah, one of the the executive compensation studies I guess that you'd run these experiments were 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 salaries and executive compensation ended up going up going up. Because what happened was they did not compare themselves to the
Louise within the company, they compare themselves to the other friends, CEOs and other community people with their tentacles on their level. I met this guy, he was in charge of compensation in big bag. I gave a talk about 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 with the salaries for everybody. He's available well and he said if that database got leaked probably everybody. But the person at the top,
It would be able to be unhappy because everybody thinks they're a little better than the idiot. The other is, of course, yeah. And why is that he is paying getting paid more? There was a company. I visited that had a 16-point rating approach to your employees when it was in quarter of percents and it translate into a bonus, and the total bonus was something like 4,000 dollars. So if you had 16 points you will get $4,000 but you know, the jump between fourteen Point. 25 to 14.5 was not a big Grant Financial issue.
People were unbelievably upset over a quarter of a point difference. Why? Man, because you judging hierarchy? Yeah, I really like if you got 14 and a half, I got 14 points in the quarter. And why are you better than me like? 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, right. What you're trying to do is you trying to think about this engaged?
And disengage process is actually about not thinking about it, right? The engage 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 I need more money, but the fact is that for you to be fully engrossed in what you're doing and derive joy, that the moment it actually means not thinking about work, but when you think about work, you think about work. So you kind of in a different state of mind, rather make 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 sleep is hard to predict when you awake, we engage this process of trying to deliberately thinking about what's going on in the state. That is so different from the
Between 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 ordered too many things, but that's kind of, as advanced as we get the truck. 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 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
variation. 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 of different workplaces over a very long time. Yeah. Then be able to attribute how motivated you were to this condition. So so long as my human bias as well. Right? And this is why research is so good, right? Because we do a search, you say, I don't expect you as individuals to collect all this data. I know used to do lots of things on dating dating is one of the things people have terrible intuitions
Yes, if it was, how many people have you dated? I mean, if you dated a lot, it's a dozen. They, I mean, how many people have you lived with for prolonged periods of time? Very, 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 and 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 is very hot. 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 competition, you are. Should be like, and what motivation is not just about companies, about organizations and families. Everything has the notion of motivation and everybody has ideas about it, but when you ask people,
Like how sure are you that? Your ideas are working and there's any evidence for this. Nobody does then 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 the 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, as lots of things we do. 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. That and the process of social science in which we try different things, and try to measure objectively, what's going on in 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 the real benefit is to say, what can I take from my life? What are the things about my life that I'm not?
Ring. Can I be a bit better? And observing my life. Can I try to implement something? And then hopefully also, can I try to experiment it? 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 cut 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 I know you've once, you know that the knowledge is power. I was just in 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 happy those people are. They figured out what they want to do when they were like 24, they got married to somebody, they've been dating for a while. They 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 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, hyper attenuated aren't in our culture where it's taken on this outsized role and importance to assume ad hominem, is this what you're saying is like Jordan made this joke?
On Instagram. And so, therefore, I know it's a residing in the depths of his heart, right? I bet you he Bears animus towards some racial groups of wild leap, but that's exactly what we're talking about motive attribution, asymmetry on the basis of ad hominem, 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 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 gonna 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 and how we can Bridge The Divide, in our relationships, our country, and even within our families, check out episode 2, 11 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 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.
Jordan Harbinger.com / 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 an association with podcast one. My amazing team includes Jen Harbinger, Jason Anderson, Rob, Fogarty, Ian, Baird, Millie, Ocampo Josh, Ballard, and Gabe Mizrahi remember, we've Rise by lifting others. The fee for the 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,
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