Dan Ariely: Decisions, Behavior, Stress, Resilience | Turn the Lens Ep37

English Transcript

Dan Ariely: Decisions, Behavior, Stress, Resilience | Turn the Lens podcast with Jeff Frick, Episode 37

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Cold Open:
All right
So I’ll count us down
in three, two, one.

Jeff Frick:
Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here, coming to you for another episode of *Turn the Lens*. And I'm really excited about this next episode. This is a gentleman I first saw in 2016 that showed some amazing research that really kind of draws into question some really simple, basic things like: do we even have free will? What are the things that go into our decision-making? We talk a lot about evolutionary behavior and what's going on behind the scenes in the way that we think and the way we filter information. And he's got a great perspective. So joining us all the way from Durham, North Carolina, he's Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics from Duke University. Dan, great to see you today.

Dan Ariely:
Lovely to be here. Thank you.

Jeff Frick:  
So I, I did a little, I was a dual major in econ and psychology back in the day. No PhD, no Masters. But, you know, I was fascinated when I walked into the economics class and they showed all these beautiful curves. And everything is so logical and mathematical and wonderful, based on these assumptions. But then I was also in psychology, and I was like, that's not how people make decisions. We're not these super rational, computer-like decision-making machines. And your story that I'd love for you to repeat, on the organ donor participation rates, really demonstrates that we don't necessarily have as much control over what we do as we think we do.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah. So, yes, I think, you know, economics is an interesting perspective on life, but it assumes a whole lot. Some of it is not correct. It's a very interesting exercise. And you can think about under what conditions it may apply, but in many conditions, it doesn't apply. And more often than not, the implications are just wrong. So, maybe I'll start by saying that my metaphor for the human mind is that we're walking around with a Swiss Army knife. You know, what we have in our mind is not a perfect tool for anything. Like the Swiss Army knife is not great for anything. It's sort of good for lots of things. That's what our mind is designed for. But our Swiss Army knife is designed for tasks from a long time ago. It's not designed for the modern world. So we’re carrying with us a Swiss Army knife with most tools being irrelevant. So now, when we have to deal with retirement, medical decisions, AI, and misinformation, we’re not set up to deal with that. And because of that, we make mistakes. And we don't make mistakes because we're stupid or incapable or anything like that. We are making the same mistakes because we are not designed to be in this modern environment. When you ask people, you know, how many of you don't sleep as much as you think you should, everybody raises their hand. How many of us eat more than we think we should? And, you know, the list goes on and on. It's very clear that our environment is not designed for the kind of tools we have. And it also means that the environment has a lot to do with the decisions we end up making.

So I'll give you two examples. You ask people, do you like apples? And most people say yes. And then you put a bowl of apples. Almost nobody takes one. And you cut the apples into quarters, and they disappear. It turns out that eating a whole apple is just a little bit too much work. You know, eating a quarter is just the right amount of work.

Or the example that you referred to is an example from organ donation that basically looks at different countries in Europe and shows that in some countries, the participation rate in organ donation is in the 90s, and in some it's in the 20s. And when you ask, what's the difference between these two countries—the countries in the 90% and the country in the 20%—is it that they educate people differently? Do they have different camaraderie? Do they have different ideologies, different religion, different whatever? The answer is, they have a different enrollment form.

And countries that have what is called ‘opt-in’—where you’re assumed not to be an organ donor and you have to opt in to become an organ donor—many people don't opt in. People don't take that step. They say, oh, it's too complex, too difficult. I'm not sure. Let me stay out. And those countries have about a 20% participation rate.

Countries that have an ‘opt-out’—where you’re assumed to be an organ donor and you have to sign to get out of it—people say, oh, it's a difficult decision, complex. I'm not going to do anything. I'll stay with it. And all of this suggests that in many decisions, we don't know what to do. And when we don't know what to do, we do what the interface tells us to do. And interestingly enough, as decisions become bigger and more complex and more meaningful—like organ donation, which involves our death and our relatives and mourning and medical aspects and all kinds of things—as decisions get bigger, we don't know what to do even more, and we just don't do anything. And when we don't do anything, we let the person who set up the decision environment decide for us.

So we call this choice architecture. It is that the environment has a lot to do with our final decisions, but we often don't understand it. So imagine that you and I would stand outside of the Department of Motor Vehicles, where most people get these forms, and imagine we meet one person who gets an opt-in form. And because of that, they did not sign and did not participate. And one person gets an opt-out form, and because of that, they didn't sign and participated. And they come out, and we say to this person, "Hey, we see you participated, and we see you didn't participate. Please explain why." Do you think anybody would say, "The form told me to do so," right? Or would anybody say, "I didn't know what to do. I did the default," of course not.

After the fact, people tell stories. Somebody who didn't sign the form, didn't join the program, would say something like, "I'm really worried about medicine these days, and I'm really worried about whether physicians will see that I signed this form and will not treat me as well, or will pull the plug a little earlier." And somebody that did end up participating will say, "You know, this is how my parents taught me to be a caring, wonderful individual." But those stories will come after the decision, not before it.

And we usually think that decisions are driven by our preferences. We have preferences, and they drive decisions. The reality is that we often make decisions because of the environment, and then we justify them. Yeah, we justify them so well, and we tell the story so well that very quickly, we convince even ourselves. And I'll give you one last example. You look at what's the biggest contributor to 401(k) savings accounts. It's the default rate at your employer. But when you ask people, "How did you come to decide that you want to save 5%, 10%, 12%, whatever it is?" very few people say, "Oh, it’s the default rate."

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Dan Ariely:
They'll say, "Well, I have a story. I thought about it—cost and benefits and so on." So we're very good at telling stories. And these stories obfuscate the real thing that drove the decision, which is often the interface.

Jeff Frick:
It's funny. Reminds me of the evening news when they talk about the stock market performance that day. And unless it's a day where the Fed actually did something or there was something obvious, they always have these explanations as to why the market was hot or why the market was cool. And it's like, well, that's easy to do after the fact. But there's another thing that I think is really interesting that's working against us, and that's this filter between our receptors of information—our eyes, our ears, our nose, our skin—and what we think happened. But it's got to go through this amazing amount of preconceived biases, our individual experiences. And, you know, what really did happen?

And my favorite example is when my wife and I—we've been married over 30 years—we go to the farmer’s market together, and we buy some fruits and vegetables, and we come home and talk about what happened at the farmer's market. We saw completely different things. We saw completely different people. You know, I was noticing this beautiful display of fruit that I wanted to take a picture of. She's over, you know, engaging maybe with a friend that she saw that I didn't see. But it's really weird. You come back, and we went to the same place, we experienced the same geographic destination, and yet what we experienced and the reality that we had are totally different. And that's a real mind opener.

Dan Ariely:
And imagine there's a range of things you can look at, and you can say, well, I'm looking at these things, and your wife is looking at those things. But sometimes, even if you look at the same thing, you could interpret them differently. And the classic example for that is sports. You can have two fans of opposing teams watching the same move, and the referee is making a call against somebody, and one person says the referee is absolutely correct and they're willing to bet money on it. And the other one is saying the referee must be blind, or vicious, or being paid. And both of those people would pay money for this bet. It's not as if they're just saying it.

But yes, we have this incredible sense of trust in our senses, but we are not really experiencing the outside world. We're experiencing an inside world that goes through a very thick layer of interpretation. You know, one way we see it, of course, is visual illusions.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
When you see a visual illusion, you basically say, "I can't trust my eyes." Yes, there's your eyes, and there's your brain, and you only have access to the information after your brain has been processing it. You don't have access to information out there.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
And because of that—because this is what we have to deal with—it’s the inside representation. That representation has been worked on and it has been morphed and changed in all kinds of ways. But our sense is that it's true.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
You're willing to bet on it. You're willing to promise it. Eyewitness testimony, I mean, all kinds of things like that that are just not as accurate as people think.

Jeff Frick:
Right? Right. And we're all experiencing, and then we have an oversimplification, I think, to where our expectation is everyone else is experiencing the same thing that we're experiencing, when in fact, to me, the wake-up call is one day just realizing that everybody's Facebook feed or LinkedIn feed or social media feed is different. It's not a feed in order—all your friends and what they posted—it's what Facebook thinks is going to keep you on the platform a little bit longer. And then when you wake up and say, not only is your Facebook feed different, but even the feed as you're watching that sports game or the feed as we're at the farmer’s market is actually different, even though we're technically, one might argue, looking at the same thing.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah. And, you know, there's a really interesting thing about this thing we call empathy. So empathy is really an amazing human skill. It's if you stubbed your toe, I will be able to empathize to some degree. If you told me something good happened to you, I am able to empathize; something bad will happen. How do we do that? How do we have empathy? Do we really feel the other person? No. The reality is that empathy is based on mirror neurons. These are neurons that basically activate what I think you're experiencing in my brain. So when I am experiencing empathy for you, for stubbing your toe, I'm not really experiencing you stubbing your toe. My mind activates "stubbing the toe" mirror neurons. And then I am projecting that this is how you're feeling. Now it's an amazing capacity, right? It's a thing that makes people incredible, right? I can feel your pain. But of course, I'm not experiencing your pain. I'm experiencing my pain as I would experience it, sort of, if I had your experience. But that means that our empathy is within our minds. It's not as if we're stepping into your mind and I'm experiencing with you. I'm experiencing how I would experience it. Maybe it's 50% of what I would feel if I were to stub my toe. But I think that that's what you're experiencing.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Dan Ariely:
That’s why empathy is not what you're experiencing; it's what I would experience. It's a simulation of what I would experience if I would go through a situation like you. But because of that, we have this incredible sense of similarity. "Oh, I just feel your pain." No, I don't feel your pain. I feel my pain as if I was in your shoes. But that's—and it's a dramatically important thing. It's what makes us human. It's unbelievably important. But it also gives us the sense that we're actually experiencing the other person when we're not really.

Jeff Frick:
So I have pages and pages here of notes. One of the things that we do as people is we look for patterns. I had Evan Benway on from Moodsonic, you know, and he's like, we look at stars in the heavens and we see patterns. We see stories, we see shapes, we see people. At the same time, you talk about how we often look for complexity in something that we don't understand. "It must be complex if I don't understand. There must be some complexity." How do those things interact? You know, this desire to simplify, because, again, it's this evolutionary biology. We have to bucket things and free up cycles for the cheetah that's going to jump out of the bushes. But then, at the same time, when we are confused, we are amazing at coming up with all kinds of complex and rich stories to explain the unexplainable.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah, so I actually was going to do a little video on patterns, so I prepared this beforehand. So this is what is called white noise. White noise is sometimes auditory [static noise], a wide spectrum, but sometimes it's pictures like this. And imagine an experiment in which I show you a picture like this, and I say, "Did you see a pattern?" And I show another one. And each of those is randomly generated, so there shouldn't be a pattern. And we ask you, "Do you see a pattern? Do you see a pattern? Do you see a pattern?" And the question is under what conditions would people start seeing more patterns? And the answer is under conditions of stress. And I don't mean the stress of saying, "Gee, I have so much email, I don't know how I’ll finish." It's the kind of stress that says, "I don't understand the world." I don't understand why I was fired and not them. I don't understand why I've been healthy and then I have this disease. I don't understand what's happening with AI—will I get to keep my job? I don't understand this thing with this virus called COVID-19. I don't understand why the Houthis are attacking shipping around the world and so on. When you basically say, "I don't understand the world," our mind goes into a mode of trying to see patterns. Like you gave the analogy of the tiger, like if I'm an animal in the jungle and I'm stressed, all my senses now are trying to over-interpret things to see if there's a tiger. I see a leaf moving, and I say, "Oh, maybe it’s here." Right. I basically go into hyper mode of alertness and try to see patterns. So that's the thing—that we see patterns. But of course, we don't stop there, especially when we talk about misbelief and people coming up with alternative theories for the world. We want a pattern, we want a villain, and we want a complex story. And you would say, okay, I understand pattern. Why do you want a villain? And we want a villain because we want to blame somebody else that is not us.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
That's understandable. And why complex? Because we want to feel that we know more than other people. We want to feel in control. So imagine that society is looking down upon you, you lost your job, and something is not going well. You're not getting your fair—You feel you're not getting your fair share. You're feeling low on the totem pole of society. If now you have a story with a villain that is complex and you're the only one who understands it, now you feel more in control. Right, you feel more in control and better compared to other people.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
And actually, what they show in this last book I wrote called *Misbelief,* the point there was to basically examine how normal people come to believe some very strange things. And it turns out that stress is the condition that gets people to go down that path. If somebody is completely unstressed, they are not going to go down the funnel of misbelief. They're not going to wake up one day and say, "Oh, let me look for an alternative theory."

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
If people are comfortable in their lives, they're not going to look for alternative theories. But when people are stressed, they're looking for an alternative theory with a villain and ideally a complex theory that could explain to them why they are where they are and other people are where they are. But they would feel more in control. So of course, there are more elements to this. There's a big cognitive element and personality and social element to this. But this initial element of stress, one other thing that is very important about this is the stress we feel is a combination of the stress that we get minus the resilience. So you can think about felt stress as the amount of stress minus resilience. Right, that's kind of the equation. Because if I feel more resilience, I can handle stress. But if I can't, then the stress gets worse. And resilience is something that we're not doing well on these days.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
Resilience comes from having close personal friends, and in general, people spend much less time with their friends, and it comes from family ties. And we spend more time with our nuclear family, but less time with our family. It comes from friends in general, but, you know, we have fewer friends.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Dan Ariely:
Even at work, people are not supposed to talk to their friends about romantic questions, or illness, or politics. So we have fewer and fewer friends, and we have less and less trust in the government—that if something bad happened to us, the government will be there for us, or the healthcare system, or whatever. And very sadly, it turns out that as financial inequality increases, people are less likely to ask for help.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well I've got the book right here, so we're going to definitely talk about the book. I have to say, it's not—it's not the most uplifting book I've read in the last little while.

Dan Ariely:
It is not the most uplifting book, no.

Jeff Frick:
But let's, let's get into a couple of the things. So going back to basic psychology, right? One of my favorite classes was rat lab. And you learn really early in rat lab that the way to get the rat to hit the bar the most is to give them a random return at a random rate. And that's—that's—they'll just keep hitting that bar. And we see that executed against humans in something simple like a one-armed bandit, you know, a slot machine is kind of the classic case where it's a random payout at a random rate.

Dan Ariely:
Let's emphasize that because I think it's so important. So what B.F. Skinner showed is that when you have a rat and you give the rat the lever, and every 200 presses, they get the reward—that's exciting. But if it's random, it's between 1 and 400, the same expected value, the rat will click much faster and they will continue clicking even when the reward stops. And if you think about it, that's the principle that Las Vegas is based on.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
If you knew that for every 100 of those you'll get, you know, $7 back, you will not do it. But it's the randomness that keeps us going. And you can think about our phones. Your phone is an amazing mechanism for random reinforcement. Right, you drive, and there's a little ring on your phone or a buzz or something like that. And in that moment you say, "Oh, maybe this is an important email."

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Dan Ariely:
Now, you don't get that many important emails; you don't get that many important things. But from time to time, you do, and you’re not thinking about the average or the minimum. You're thinking about the possibility that it's going to be rewarding, and therefore people end up being really curious. Right. They say, "Oh, maybe this is the one"

Jeff Frick:
Maybe this is the one. Well, why I wanted to bring it up is, it's one thing if it's Vegas and I walk into a casino, and I kind of know that that's the game, and I can get on the plane and fly home.

Dan Ariely:
By the way, what do you think

Jeff Frick:
What I was gonna say, now it’s in your phone, as you said.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
And not only is it in your phone, you're competing against a computer that's been set up specifically to optimize and basically play your own biology against you. And it's in your pocket 24/7. And they have a level of detailed knowledge about you that the casino never used to have back in the day to make it even more effective. I mean, that I think is one of the biggest stressors, whether it's conscious stress or unconscious stress.

Dan Ariely:
Absolutely.

Jeff Frick:
So many people are suffering now without the power to just turn the stupid thing off because, as you said, the chances of it actually being that important of a message are relatively small.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah. So first of all, before we move to this, just something about Vegas. What do you think people spend more money on—sports in the U.S. or on gambling?

Jeff Frick:
Gambling.

Dan Ariely:
By sports, I mean going to sporting events, a subscription to TV stations, and stuff like that.

Jeff Frick:
Gambling, I don’t even think it’s close. And now you've got sports and gambling. That's a whole other conversation for another podcast. Now that the proverbial fox is in the henhouse, I think.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah. So, the statistics I saw were that people spend on gambling more than all of entertainment put together—more than sports, movies, theater—and gambling is bigger because it uses this very basic reward mechanism. Now, the thing about information technology and phones in particular, as you said, is really terrible. And kind of a metaphor for this is to think about cars. So think about cars and how they get better. Every year, cars get better. And they get slightly better engines. They get slightly better fuel efficiency. But the real advances in cars is that they recognize that we are bad drivers, and they're doing some things to make us less able to kill ourselves.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
So we have seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, rearview mirrors, side mirrors, and lights on the mirrors. My car has this sensor that if I get too close to a car, it applies the brake. And it has a little thing that if I go over the line, it makes it harder to move it. I mean, just incredible technology. And every year, the engineers are coming with new things, and every year, people are proving that we're even worse drivers than they thought. And the cycle continues.

Now, think about information technology. If cars are developing every year to become more compatible with human nature, and to assume that we are bad drivers, is information technology every year developing assuming that we are worse consumers of information? Or is it assuming that we are more perfect? And I think it's the other way around. I think that every year we diverge between our humanity, the Swiss Army Knife that we carry, and the way that information technology demands from us in terms of ability.

And it's kind of amazing to look at cars and say, look how much regulation there is for cars. You know, things about bumpers, and, you know, cars are unbelievably regulated because it's so clear how bad drivers we are.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
Information technology—Facebook, Twitter, and so on—they just assume that we’re perfect.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
That there’s no reason to regulate anything because, yeah, we could make perfect decisions. But I don't see any evidence that says that we are better information consumers than we are drivers. I think that the immediate consequences are different. Like, in one case, we kill ourselves, we kill other people, the evidence is there. In the other case, we degrade our social capital. We get depressed, we get envious, we go down the funnel of misbelief—all kinds of things. Not as easy to quantify. But I don't think we're better at it. I think we're actually terrible consumers of information. And I think we’re terrible in... in actually lots of these technologies that are developing further and further from our human nature.

Jeff Frick:  
I hope you have like six hours; there are so many places we can go. But the one I want to point out there is really this kind of law of unintended consequences when you've got this misaligned incentive structure. So, you know, from the Facebook— we’ll just pick on Facebook just because it's easy— from their perspective, they want you to stay on the site. But it turns out that the stuff that gets you to stay the longest is the stuff that's the most extreme. So you got this kind of law of unintended consequences which maybe Facebook wasn't specifically trying to push people to the extremes, but it's the extreme stuff that gets people to click, which is what their objective is. And then you get this other really horrible effect, which is we so quickly normalize things so that we can move on and bucket them. And so the only way to keep the clicks going is to make this stuff more and more and more extreme.

So in this pursuit of clicks to sell a few more ads, this law of unintended consequences is in fact pushing division. And the other kind of slice on it, to get your take, especially in the context of friends and friendships and keeping those strong, is just kind of this micro-segmentation as we all now go with an AI-driven, specific little feed that's targeted to us.

So, you know, we spend more of our time in this little micro-hole versus a more general... And you know, you talk about trust in the news; when there was only one source and it was just Walter Cronkite, he had to kind of cross all the bounds because there was only one source. So I wonder if you can talk about this. I think it's really scary.

And the final piece to throw out is, you know, there's kind of biology speed, which is pretty damn slow. You know, there's kind of people-as-a-civilization speed, which has been a little bit faster. But it wasn't that long ago that your father and your grandfather and his grandfather all probably did the same thing. And you could probably expect your kids to do the same.

And now we've got these exponential curves in the technology side, which we're just not very well equipped to handle. And I think the ChatGPT explosion on the scene was just kind of an exponential curve in your face, like all of a sudden, "Oh my God, I can talk to a supercomputer, and it'll talk back to me."

Dan Ariely:
Yeah. So, lots of things—lots of things in there. So to start with, I think that we can even go a step more backward and say people don't like to pay for services with money. So we pay with time. Like, you can imagine a universe in which we would say, you know what, Facebook is so wonderful. I'll pay $10 a month for this. You know, but by the amount of time people spend on Facebook, it should be easy to justify, you know, three cups of coffee.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
Or if you're in San Francisco, one. But, you know, we are reluctant. We're happy to pay for coffee, but we're not that happy to pay for services. So a lot of these technologies were left with, like, "How do we provide this technology?" where people on one hand are saying they want to spend a lot of time, and on the other hand, "I’m not willing to pay." So the advertising model came, and that's kind of the beginning of the unintended consequences, right? The world would have been a very different world if we paid for it. And then of course, what happened is that once you pay with your time, they're incentivized. You know, there was a—like, you can imagine a world in which we which we paid for Facebook, they would not be incentivized. They would be incentivized to keep us for longer—months, years—but not per day, right. They would say that's not in their best interest, but in this case, it's in their best interest to get us to be there for longer. And what are the things that get to be there longer? It's the things that are provocative and the things that are less likely to be true, that are more puzzling, more sensationalist, and so on.

And not only that, they're not just producing information, they're allowing people to produce information. So now there's a competition, there's a market for people to produce this thing, and now everybody is competing in this pool of lots of people who are trying to create a signal. And now, you know, whoever is the noisiest can create one.

And then the other thing that you mentioned, which is very important, is that there is this focusing on an audience. You know, think about it. When I was a kid and there was network and national television, network television, whoever was there had to talk to everybody. Now, pick your network. It's like people with the same ideas are talking to people with basically the same ideas. It's happening on, you know, on social media. But it happens everywhere. And that, by the way, is very bad for democracy.

You know, the idea for representative democracy, it’s kind of interesting. But the moment you have representative democracy and people can only talk to their base, now we get a very different approach because people can say all kinds of ridiculous things to their base—not as truth, but as basically camaraderie, right? "Look at these idiots on the other side." You could never say it if you said it to everybody. But if you say it mostly to your base, that's a very different story.

So, and we created this competition between information producers who are trying to become more and more extreme. You know, sometimes I feel very kind of sympathetic toward journalists. Imagine you're a journalist and you're fighting with people that have a blog or write on TikTok or whatever, you know, and you have journalistic standards, and they don't. You know, how easy is it to keep journalistic standards?

Jeff Frick:
Right. Well, and this, this blurring between information and entertainment...

Dan Ariely:
Yep.

Jeff Frick:
which, if the lines are clear, great. You know, if I'm watching Saturday Night Live or I'm at a theater and, you know, it's satire or stand-up comedian stuff where it's clear. But when it's perceived to be information, you know, that's not necessarily good when it isn't even really intended to be information in the first place. Which, which takes me to another big word.

Dan Ariely:
Let me say one other thing. I, I was at some reception for a really wonderful professor at Harvard, and somebody introduced him and she read from the story about him in "The New Yorker" from many years ago that was kind of, you know, glorifying all the wonderful things that he has done and all the things he should be glorified for. But she also said that these days nobody would ever write such a glowing story anymore. You know, if you think about it and you look at all the profiles anywhere, just there are no good people, and it's not that there are not good people anymore. It's that bad news sells.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
And positive news is just not as exciting. You know, the headline, "a guy did something good" is not as exciting as "a guy said something nasty to somebody else."

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
So we have this competition, like you said, the laws of unintended consequences. I think that the world of free information, together with this very fierce competition, is changing not just social media, it's changing journalism. And I think information in general and everybody—there's kind of a race to the bottom.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Dan Ariely:
Everybody's doing things that are more superficial and can be caught in, you know, 17 characters and three seconds, and it's very tough. And sometimes now you see exceptions, and sometimes those exceptions work. But mostly it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where editors are saying, "we need, if it bleeds, it leads," and, you know, what do you put on the top and so on. And then people get used to that, and that creates a very, a very vicious cycle that is very much against us.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
You know, there was this, there was a claim that after Brexit, after Brexit, there were lots of Google searches from England about what Brexit means. You know, that people didn't know really what it meant.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
You know, they probably got lots of all kinds of other propaganda, but now all of a sudden said, "Oh my goodness, let's check what this really means."

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Because, you know, there's, because I think, you know, "if it bleeds, it leads." It's always been the editorial point of view, and it's always been, you know, what's on top of the fold. I think what's different is that was your once-a-daily newspaper.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:  
And it wasn't coming at you at machine speed, in your phone 24/7. And if you didn't happen to bite on that picture of a burning car on the front of the paper, we'll send you a different one. Maybe you'll bite on this one or a different one. So I think it's really scary when these principles are applied with literally machine speed and AI to try to trigger your emotional response. When, I always think of like, spam, like, we don't even know how much spam Google's getting before it even gets to our mailbox. But, you know, you try to manage your spam and manage your inbox. You're fighting against machines that are operating at a different scale and a different speed, and they're just playing a different game than you are as a person.

Dan Ariely:
And it’s very taxing.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
And you know, it's, it's very taxing. Like, you know, I—even reading through, because, you know, my life is kind of interesting and complex. I get emails from lots of places and lots of people, and it's hard to know.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
And, you know, this, this additional level of, okay, this person wrote me, there’s an attachment. Is it a real person? Is it not? What do I do? Google didn't block it.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
It's a very taxing activity. It’s taxing, taxing on our society to a great, to a great degree.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Let's talk about trust.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Frick:
As a topic. And I want to lean into it. You know, Edelman puts out a trust index every year. They've been putting it out for quite a while. And they distinguish between kind of institutions and leaders. And you brought up the car earlier in self-driving car. And I think what’s really interesting, to pick on Tesla for a minute, is people now are so comfortable with technology that they just assume technology works. They don't read the instruction manuals, they don't run it through a burn-in period. So you've got literally people sitting in the back seats of their Tesla car, which is not a full self-driving level five car. It's a super cruise control. And yet, how is the trust potentially with the technology, the car compare with the trust of the organization—how are they keeping my information, are they keeping it private, are they taking care of it? And then you've got kind of the trust of the leadership, and then you've got trust of institutions.

And all of that really seems to be in a little bit of a crisis, because trust is, you know, one of these things that we decide as a group to share in that trust and not necessarily question everything because we don't just—we don't have the mental bandwidth and we need some foundation to live on. So have you seen kind of the evolution of trust or the dissolution of trust or the shifting of trust change both within misbelieving and kind of the conspiracy stuff, but also this just increasingly complex world?

The other piece is to throw out that you see this a little bit is, you know, "right to fix," you know, I want to fix my car, I used to fix my car. There’s a big story about John Deere tractor guys that can't fix their tractors anymore. At the same time, the level of complexity in the machines that we engage with, the percentage of software in any product versus something I can fix with a wrench and ruler and tools is different. So this complexity is kind of running away and really making it more of a challenge to figure out what's to trust and what's not to trust.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah. So first of all, trust is unbelievably important. And, you know, there's this saying that fish don't know that they're in water because they're surrounded by it. And to some degree, we are surrounded by trust. And we trust that the vegetables we buy in the store are without pesticides. And we trust that somebody washed the lettuce when they serve the salad. And we trust that somebody inspected the elevator and that the brakes in our car will work. And we trust and we trust and we trust. It's kind of amazing, the kinds of things that we trust. And when we start losing trust, bad things happen. By the way, I don't know if you've seen, but since COVID, there are more people who are not giving their kids standard immunizations.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
People have lost trust in the health care system. I recently talked to a woman who's a cancer patient and she's refusing to take chemotherapy. She doesn't trust pharma, and after COVID, she's not willing to take chemotherapy. She's willing to have surgery, but not chemotherapy. So, you know, we lose a lot of trust.

Now, when we think about how we update our beliefs about trust, there are things that we experience and there are things we don't experience. So think about the cycle of learning from experience. You say to yourself, "I think that the probability of texting and driving and something bad happening is 2%." Just making it up. It's probably not 2%. And one day you text and drive, and nothing bad happens. It's only a 2% probability. But at the end of this experience, you say, "Oh, maybe it's not 2%, maybe it's 1.9%." So you do it more and more and more and more.

So when we deal with low probability events, every time we try them, our experience teaches us the wrong thing until it's too late, and then we crash into something. So when you think about something like driving in a car like the Tesla, if people kind of let go of their hands and nothing bad happens, they say, "Oh my goodness, it might be safer than I thought." And then they do more and more and more and more. Of course, you know, the probability that something bad will happen could be very small. It could be incredibly devastating. It could happen at some point.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
But it's a very bad feedback loop. But there are things that we need trust for, like trust in the health care system, that we don't get to experience in the same way. So when we talk about trust, I think the question is, are we talking about trust in things that we can learn from experience, or are we talking about trust in things we can't learn about — they're only from description?

And things that we can learn from experience, we can learn the wrong lesson from because we update too much. And things that we just get from description, you know, those things would be rather stable. But in general, I think trust is like a public good in society. And when people stop trusting things, we lose a lot.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
And you know what? Think about it. Where do you get to experience the most trust in society? I think it's with money. You know, you pay with your credit card, you do this, and you basically check your bank once in a while, and it feels like it's all okay. And it's kind of magical. You go to different places, use your card online and so on, and things kind of accumulate, and they seem to be okay. You have a list of what's going on. It's a great exercise in trust.

And this is one of the reasons why I don't like cryptocurrency, because I want people to experience trust. Now, I understand the cryptocurrency people are saying, "I don't trust people." And I understand. But for me, the answer would be, if you don't trust people, great. Let's build trust. Let's work on institutions that will get more trust.

For them to say, "No, no, I just want a payment mechanism that doesn't rely on trust," I think of it as very sad because I say payment is the place where people could learn the most that you can trust, you can trust people. So I want you to use that trust. And I want you to prove to yourself five times a day that you can trust the institution, trust the bank, trust the regulators, and you can even trust that if somebody stole your credit card, they will get it back to you. I want those experiences.

And if you don't trust it, let's work on the trust. Let's fix the trust. Let's not try to bypass it. So I think we need to work on trust. I think we need to work on trust. We are at a trust crisis. And if you ask me who should make the first move, I think it should be the government. I think it should be the government to make the first move to show trust in us, the citizens, rather than do something the other way.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
And, you know, when I look at organizations, one of the biggest de-motivators for people in organizations... Bureaucracy. And why is that? It's bureaucracy tells people, "I don't trust you. I don't value your time. And I don't want to try and improve anything. Just follow the rules."

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Dan Ariely:
And do whatever you're told. But to not trusting anybody is a very — it's the opposite from empowering.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Dan Ariely:
It’s a weakening position that has lots of consequences. Well, I think we need to figure out trust-building mechanisms in companies and in society.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well, unfortunately right now, and we haven't got to the workplace, which is one of our many topics. You know, these return-to-office mandates, as well as this increased kind of surveillance society in which we're getting everything from cameras everywhere to keystroke monitoring to everything else. I mean, nothing says "I don't trust you" more than that.

Dan Ariely:
Terrible, terrible.

Jeff Frick:
The same managers are going, "Well, how do I know if you're working if you're not moving your mouse?" And it's like, well, because you're a bad manager. You don't know what I'm supposed to be working on? You're not checking in on my progress against my tasks. You're not... You know, we're not working towards a common goal. It's just like this lazy — it's just like this lazy substitute for actually managing people; we’ll just monitor your keystroke activity.

Dan Ariely:
Yeah, it's not just lazy. I think it's... So, so look, so much to say about this. But think about what's called work-life balance, which is a term that I don't like. So, at my university, the rule is that if somebody is going to a doctor's visit, they should mark that they're taking two hours to a doctor's visit because for some reason, this is not part of work. This is life.

Jeff Frick:
Right?

Dan Ariely:
And I'm trying very hard to fight this for all the people who are working with me. And, you know, I say, a whole person is coming to work. And if they are not healthy, it's bad for the whole person. It's not just bad for the home person, and if that person decides in the middle of the day to go for a run, it's good for the whole person. And if that person decides to... And, like, think about books. There are books that are maybe work books and books that are life books, but there are many books that are the same. They could be both.

And I think of it as like a line that says there are awful things to do at home, dishes. Awful things to do at work, bureaucracy. And there's lots of things in the middle that are good for both. And I think that I want people to do what's in the middle. I want people to go to see a doctor, and I want them to exercise, and I want them to sleep well.

Like, you know, it's kind of an amazing thing that you say, "Sleep on your own time." And no, you know, you hire the whole person with their whole complexity and the whole talent and you want them to flourish. And this, this micromanaging approach is just completely undermining the idea that the person coming to work is a whole person with all of their skills and so on, and... Anyway, so I really... I really dislike it.

But the moment you start talking about work-life balance and you say, "Take two hours to go to a doctor, it's on your time," people say, "Okay, so I'm finishing at 5?" You know, the whole equation changes because once you start creating these norms that this is work and this is life and there is separation, people say, "Oh, there's separation? Let me take advantage of it." Can I tell you one other metaphor?

Jeff Frick:
Of course.

Dan Ariely:
You talked about coming back to work. So, as you know, I was badly injured. I was in the hospital for a very long time. And for the first almost four months, I was fed by tube. So, I had the tube, and they would feed me 30 eggs a day and 7,000 calories a day to try and help the body rebuild.

Jeff Frick:
Wow.

Dan Ariely:
I lost weight on that diet. And anyway, they come to me almost at the end of these four months, and they say, "The day after tomorrow, we'll take the tube out, and you'll start eating on your own." And what do you think was my reaction? I said, "Please, don't. Please keep the tube in." I said, "I have discovered the future." I say in the future, nobody would want to waste time eating. I mean, why would you? I say, look, I don't think in the future people will go with tubes. They will take little pills, and everything will be solved. It will be efficient. Like, why would you want to chew and spend so much time on this and so on? Anyway, of course, I was the patient; they were the doctor. So, they took the tube out, and I started eating. And what happened? I remember that food tastes really good.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Dan Ariely:
It turns out that four months were enough to forget what food tastes like. I remembered that food had a taste, but I didn't remember the full range of enjoyment. Now, the reason I'm telling you this story is that the question is, what does it mean to get back to work? And some people think that getting back to work is just... you're at work. But first of all, I think that after two years of COVID, people forgot what it is to be at work. But I also think that when people got back to work, they were not really at work. At work means that you have really close friends at work, you have people that you care about, that you joke with, that you have a common sense of humor, that you can complete their sentences, and they can complete yours, that you want them to do well, that you're happy to help them. You're happy to make your day longer because you want their benefits. And you know something about their kids and their spouses, and you're happy with them and sad with them and so on. And when you come back to work, you're not really back at work at the same level that you truly have this full potential. So we had a very social life at work, then we took a break from it. And then when we come back physically to work, we're not really fully at work.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
And I've seen most places are not really working on how to get people to reintegrate at work. And until we do that, until people have some of their more meaningful relationships back at the workplace, we're not going to be back at work. We're going to, you know, be in the same building.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, yeah.

Dan Ariely:
But not fully back at work.

Jeff Frick:
Okay, so Dan, we're coming to the end of our time, and I still have pages and pages of notes, so maybe we'll have to have chapter two. But, you know, kind of as a parting thought, as you think about the complexity of people versus this desire to be so rational, what advice do you give people to better cope in this kind of messy, sloppy, people-populated world?

Dan Ariely:
Okay, so there's lots of things, but I would say number one is figure out where your resilience is coming from, both where you are getting it from other people and where you can give it, and work on it. You know, we are here for a tough ride, I think, for the next decade. Life is complex. Things in the world are not going to settle soon, and we need to invest in resilience. Spend time with friends, family, loved ones. Don't bicker, you know, things like that.

And then the second thing is, I think that there's a lot to gain by asking yourself what from our working assumption is not correct. We grow up, and we have some assumptions, and then we go on, and we don't examine those assumptions very often. Midlife crisis is a good opportunity to examine some of those assumptions. Sometimes when people get the diagnosis of terminal illness, they do that. But I think we need to do it more often than just midlife crisis and when we get a terminal illness diagnosis. So I think it's very good to kind of sit and ask ourselves, what are our basic assumptions about life, and which assumptions are we sure about, and which assumptions... maybe not so sure about.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Dan Ariely:
You know, if I have now a project, when I talk to people who are either very sick or lost somebody close, and it is amazing under those conditions what life changes they're able to make. I recently talked to somebody who's very sick, very short time to live, did some dramatic changes in their life. And he's having an amazing last chapter, about two years, but an amazing chapter now. Now, what can we do without that bad news in terms of examining our basic assumptions? I think many people had kind of this examination in early COVID, but very few people followed up on it. I think it's a good, it's a good time to ask yourself, what are our assumptions? What do we fully trust? What do we need to change?

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. All right, Dan, well, we're going to have to leave it there until we pick it up next time. Maybe before the holidays to help people deal with how to manage family at Thanksgiving and talk about more than just the weather.

Dan Ariely:
Absolutely important.

Jeff Frick:
So I really appreciate the time today. Big fan of your work. And look forward to the next time we talk. Really appreciate it. And thanks again.

Dan Ariely:
Thank you. Take care. Bye.

Jeff Frick:
He's Dan, I'm Jeff, you're watching "Turn the Lens" with Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. We'll catch you next time. Take care.

Cold Close
Thank you, Dan.
Anytime.
Love it.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it.

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Dan Ariely: Decisions, Behavior, Stress, Resilience | Turn the Lens podcast with Jeff Frick, Episode 37

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