Dan Ariely

Behavioral Economist; Author of best-selling book Predictably Irrational

BIG IDEAS

• We Are Predictably Irrational
  Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?
  
  Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need? Or at prices that we would otherwise concede are beyond our budget?
  
  Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?
  
  Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace?
  
  Dan Ariely provides answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world.
  
  For businesses, these irrationalities help unlock our understanding of common behaviors and choices in shopping, pricing, investing and saving, employee recruitment and selection, office politics and a myriad of other choices and interactions.
  
  As a bonus you will also learn how much fun social science can be, and how to see more clearly the causes for our everyday behaviors, including the many cases in which we are predictably irrational.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab. A behavioral economist, Ariely’s research has shown that we all succumb to irrationality in situations where rational thought is expected. He is an expert on how people actually act–and why they act–in all kinds of business and economic environments, and what this means for business innovation, strategy, marketing and pricing.

Ariely's forthcoming book Living Irrationally (June 2010) explores fascinating findings from the hundreds of 'experiments' Dan does for his research. He'll dive into personal life (what makes us happy, how we as humans adapt and change, how we date and find mates), work life (what really motivates us, financial vs. non-financial rewards, trust, revenge) and the slippery slope of cheating (how it starts, how it snowballs).  He'll pay special attention to the financial and debt crisis, and the post-crash economy and what this means for employers, marketers and public policy.  Ariely is also author of the best-selling Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.  In this book, Dan presents research findings that provide new insights into human behavior that will help us make better decisions as individuals, as corporations, and as a society.

Ariely received a Ph.D. in marketing from Duke University, a Ph.D. and M.A. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.A. in psychology from Tel Aviv University.

He publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science, CNN, NPR, and he was interviewed for ABC's 20/20.

As a speaker, Ariely has a natural and unique talent for turning his research into vignettes that are fun, relevant and engaging, and for delivering the results in a genuinely charming, original, and often comical way.

A Closer Look at Dan

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Dan's current research agenda?

As a behavioral economist, Dan is interested in how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. Within this general interest, he is exploring a wide range of daily behaviors such as buying (or not), ordering food in restaurants, pain management, procrastination, dishonesty, and decision-making under different emotional states. Dan's hope is that a better understanding of human decision-making will help us overcome some of our built-in shortcomings, and when this is impossible or difficult, help us set public policies that will make us better off.