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
Thank you so much for saying this. I will say that the videos that people send me burning my books are So death threats are very tough. Death threats are tougher than I would have imagined. When people write a death threat, it feels worse than I would have imagined. But also burning books is very tough as well, right? It hurts.
And it also means that these are people that know something about me because they read my book. So it's extra tough. It's not a stranger. This is people who read the book and burning it. It's very tough.
One of the things we need to understand is that we always tell ourselves, oh, this is online behavior. It just stays online. No, the emotions that people have of real hate are real. Yes, it's harder to execute in real world than to execute threats. But, you know, I had people shouting at me in the street as well. But what happened is that people start hating themselves.
And then they go into what is called moral outrage. And what they try to do is they try to feel that it's not just that they dislike you, it's that your existence in the world offends them. And now you've transitioned to a very different way. If you look at, for example, how many people are adding pedophilia to the accusations of the Illuminati and so on, why is that?
It's because they're trying to add a crime that we would never forgive people for. So if they say, oh, these people are terrible, they wanted to make too much money, they changed something, you could forgive people for that. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to paint people in a way that they will be unforgivable.
And once people say it a few times and once it's become a currency, it just continues from there. And you know, I look a little strange with my half a beard and so on. But there was a long period where I felt that I was a social currency. That somebody wanted to elevate their position within the community of misbeliever. And they would make something new about me with a picture.
And there's lots in the internet to choose from. And they would get lots of social credit for it. But of course, once they say something, people start believing it. I gave a talk, by the way, somewhere... A few weeks ago, and there were flyers around that place with a barcode that you could scan to take to all kinds of terrible information about me. It's a cycle. So you ask, what happens?
What happens is that people start with a rumor. It becomes stronger and stronger. It becomes a currency. They develop emotions. It becomes an identity issue. And then they continue. And let me say one thing about identity. There's a term called Shibboleth. And Shibboleth came from a war between two tribes in Israel many years ago. And at the end of the war, they settled on two sides of the river.
And when they walked around, they wanted to know whether the people that they meet are from their tribe or from the other tribe. And it just so happened that these two tribes pronounced the name of the plant, Shibboleth, slightly differently. One of them said Shibboleth, and one of them said Sibboleth. So imagine we walk. I see you. I show you the plant. I say, hey, you, how do you call this?
If you say it the way I say it, we're brothers. We're from the same tribe. If you say it the way the other people are saying it, I try to chase you away. And we now use this term shibboleth as a discussion that is not about the facts, but it's about identity. Now, take that lens and say a discussion is not about the facts, but it's about identity.
And think about the political discourse in the world or in the U.S. How much of our political discourse is not really about the facts? It's about shibboleth. It's about this idea of you might think that I'm saying this, but I'm actually thinking I'm saying something about identity to other people. If we think about example, Fox News.
So in the last election, presidential election, Fox News said that Trump won the election and they stole the election from him. And they lost almost a billion dollars for the statement. But I think what they meant to say is, look what strong Trumpists we are. Now, because we know from their communication, they didn't believe that Trump won the election.
But what they wanted to say is they want to say, look, only people who are really strong believers of Trump will say something this extreme. Now, I'm not justifying what they said, but I'm saying if you look at it through that lens, it's much more understandable. Now, it had all kinds of downside effects because people thought they meant it literally, but they actually meant it to say,
Look what Trump supporters we are. And these discussions on Shibboleth are very confusing because if you take it at face value, you're very confused. And if you repeat something, it might start with Shibboleth, but then become something that people accept as truth and then go down the line as well.
So we want a simple version of the world. This goes back to the stress. There's this test that I love. You show people a piece of paper with black and white dots organized in a random way. You say, do you see a figure? Yes or no. There's another one. Do you see a figure? And I show you 50 of those. And people see a few figures, not that many. What happens when stress goes up?
As stress goes up, people see more figures. Now, why is that? Imagine you're an animal, like many years in the past, our evolutionary past, you're an animal in the savanna and you think there's a tiger. Now, every movement of a leaf, you want to interpret it as if it's a tiger. When we are stressed, our system goes into hyperdrive to interpret everything as if it's a pattern.
In regular life, you say, oh, there's all kinds of random things. But when you're stressed, you try very hard to see patterns. So we are very stressed. We are very stressed. We're concerned. We're not sure. And we are looking for patterns. We don't have the comfort to basically say, you know what? Let me hold judgment. I'm not yet sure what is really going on. We really want answers.
And by the way, a lot of these misbeliefs come because they give quick answers that calm people down. They also tell them it's not their fault. It's the villain's fault. And it makes them feel superior. So all of those things are very, very helpful.
Very scary, and you're very right. So let's take a slightly different example. Think about the first time that somebody in the business world betrayed your trust. What did you want to do? You said, from now on, ironclad documents. I don't care. No handshakes anymore. From now on, everything goes through legal. Nobody would ever screw me over like this.
And then you stop and you think to yourself and you say, my goodness, I benefit a lot from trust. It's true from time to time, I'm going to lose. And the thing about it is that the screwed over is going to be very salient. And the gains I'm getting from trust are not as salient.
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