Dan Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics at Duke business school and author of nine books, several of them in the high-selling self-help genre. Back in 2023, NBC made his book Predictably Irrational into a murder mystery TV show called The Irrational about a Dan Ariely-type professor (except he’s now black) who solves crimes via his vast knowledge of Malcolm Gladwell-reading-Daniel-Kahneman-studies of how to manipulate stupid human behavior:
As I wrote three years ago:
In The Irrational, the Ariely character played by Jesse L. Martin routinely makes up explanations for how his face was burned because he’s hiding that he’s the only survivor of a white nationalist firebombing of his black church that killed 13. …
The problem with the TV show is that it would be more fun if the main character was the real Dan Ariely: a charming but utterly untrustworthy blowhard.
Now that I think about it, that’s actually a good premise for a detective show. Detectives are typically moral paragons like Columbo or men driven by their code of honor to ends-justify-the-means transgressions of normal regulations like Dirty Harry.
But what if the guy called in to solve the kind of insurance fraud murders (one spouse kills another for that sweet, sweet $115,000 life insurance payout) that are the meat and potatoes of true crime docudramas was just as much of a liar as the suspects? But he’s still, sort of, the good guy because unlike one of them, he doesn’t kill people?
Back in 2021, the Data Colada blog had raised severe questions about a popular 2012 paper co-authored by Ariely, Francesca Gino, et al about how if you make people sign that they are being honest at the beginning of a paperwork form, they’ll be more honest in filling it out than if you don’t make them sign until the end of the form.
That doesn’t sound too implausible. But then a lot of plausible sounding ideas don’t actually work out.
The data in the study appears faked, perhaps by more than one co-author (which is pretty hilarious).
Gino was fired from her tenured chair by Harvard last year.
Ariely is still at Duke (at the moment), but the Data Colada folks have now …
Paywall here.
