Dan Ariely
speaker
111 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dan Ariely’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, yeah.
The whole future is ahead of me. And I'm also mostly in bed. So I'm thinking about those things, but I'm mostly in bed. And I actually don't feel very much part of human society. I don't know if you know this, but I helped write a TV show loosely based on my life. The TV show is called The Irrational, and we're filming now the second season.
In the writer's room, they asked me, what have I learned? Injuries are terrible, but they also asked me, what did I gain from this experience? And one of the very dual elements that is both good and bad is that I didn't feel human. My friends were doing regular human things, and I was not doing any of those. I wasn't dating and I wasn't going to the movies and I wasn't doing anything.
Even in the beginning, I wasn't eating. I was fed by a tube for a very long time. But I think this distance also was really helpful for me as a social scientist. I think that now I'm a little bit more objective. I might not feel as connected in some ways to the human experience, but I feel a bit more observant.
And I think some of it has been very good for me in terms of my ability to sit back and try and observe our behaviors.
The first thing that started was that I really hated the bandage removal process. So imagine that you are mostly burned. It means that the flesh is exposed. There's no skin. Bandages have to come on because you have to prevent infections. And once a day, they have to come off. The skin has to be scrubbed. The new bandages have to come again. Very, very painful process.
Morphine was helpful, but certainly not eliminating all the pain. Excruciating. And especially when the flesh is bleeding, bandages adhere. Anyway, I was very much occupied with how do we make this process not as bad? And it has to be done. It's not an avoidable process, but can it be done in a better way? That was the thing that troubled me.
And these kind of questions have led the rest of my career. I'm a social scientist, but really I'm concerned with problems that I think social science can help improve. My motivation is to say, let's analyze things that I think people are not doing so well right now, and let's think if we can do them better. Let's study them, understand them, and see if we can improve how things are done.
So it started with this experience with bandages. where I started just arguing with the nurses and doctors. And later on, I did some experiments. I found out that they were indeed wrong. I started a campaign to change how things were done in hospital, had some success, and then went from there to continue with this path.
Yeah. By the way, I think that personal passion for me is crucial. So a few years ago, I hired a guy in my research lab to work on health related problems. And he came first day in the lab and we talk about what he's going to do and the project and so on. And then I asked him about him, his life, his childhood, his hobbies, where he is.
And it turns out that his parents had to declare bankruptcy when he was in high school. And his whole growing up experience came from a family that was doing well. So a family in bankruptcy to try and fight with all the bureaucracy and the complexity that comes with it. And we talked a lot about this. And when we finished, I said to him, this looks like you're really passionate about
understanding what's happening during bankruptcy, how you can prevent it, how you can help people deal better with it. He said, yes. And I said, so why did you want to study healthcare? He said, this is what you offered. I said, okay, I don't think you should study healthcare. I think you should study these kind of problems because if that's what motivates you, that's what you should be doing.
So we switched him. We found a new job for him. We started a new project. But I think at the end, every project we do, It's going to take longer, going to be more complex, going to have ups and downs, plus downs. And to sustain the motivation, we need something that we're interested in, in general, that we're truly excited about.
And I think we need to spend time figuring those things out and finding those projects.
I think of hardest moment as a magnifying glass or as a telescope or something that allows you to understand more of the nuances. I'll give an example. Because of my injury and because I write so much about this, I get lots of people with injuries writing me. And there was this one kid who wrote me, also got very badly burned. So this is many years after I got out of hospital.
I visit him in hospital and the nurse comes in and she said, today we're going to have a new treatment. And she says the name of the treatment. And I remembered what it was and it didn't bring up good memories. And the kid says, can we do it tomorrow? And the nurse says, no. And the kid said, can we do it only on my legs and not on my upper body? The nurse said, no.
And she said, we can do it in a few hours and not now. And she says, no. And as this negotiation happens, I remember all my negotiations. And I remember the feeling of helplessness. One of the things that happened in hospital, of course, is pain. But another thing is helplessness. And I remember all the helplessness and I just couldn't stand. I was standing next to him in bed.
The nurse was standing on the bottom of his bed and talking. And I couldn't stand up. I just had to sit and put my head between my knees and kind of just breathe a little bit. And only then I realized the role of helplessness. Up to that point, I thought a lot about pain. I didn't think about helplessness. From that point on, I realized the role of helplessness and how tough it was.
So I think the moment we get into a phenomena and we get dive deeper and deeper into it, we learn more and more about it.
That was a very, very, very tough, very tough period. So here I was in COVID. I'm feeling at the best period of my life. Why? Because there's this crazy thing going on in the world. And all of a sudden, people ask for social science. So I do all kinds of things.
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