Some unexpected insights from Dan Ariely’s Wall Street Journal’s advice column!

Back in the 1930s, it was Miss Lonelyhearts. In the 1970s, Dear Ann and Dear Abby ruled the roost. The 80s had Miss Manners. In the 90s, we turned to Dan Savage for his weekly wisdom. And nowadays advice columns are popping up all over the internet, from Dear Prudence to Ask Alma.

Gur Huberman recently alerted me to a new entry in the advice sweepstakes, this time with a business focus, appearing in the Wall Street Journal. The advice in the column related to some recent blog discussion so I thought I’d share it here for you!

A Ted-talking behavioral economist answers questions about accepting lavish hospitality and work emails received at odd hours

Dear Ted,

A collaborator of mine who has a much higher h-index than mine has invited me to coauthor at his summer house in North Carolina this spring. I would love to get a PNAS paper on my C.V., but I don’t want him to think that our collaboration is contingent on this coauthorship or to feel trapped with me as his workl companion. Plus, I’m not sure how I could express my gratitude, since any data I could afford would pale in comparison with the data that he appears to be able to get for free from insurance companies. Also, I’m not much of a college basketball fan—I prefer the NBA—and I’ve also heard that it can get pretty hot and humid in the south, even in the spring. What should I do? —Liz

Let me get you to think about the first part of your question in three ways.

First, put yourself in your friend’s shoes and ask yourself how you would feel. I suspect that you would not have invited someone as your coauthor if you felt trapped by them. This isn’t an easy exercise, but I find that it is useful in thinking about our approach to relationships and favors. Perhaps you could show up to your friend’s house with a special dataset–something he was never involved in collecting, so he can publish results from it and have plausible deniability if anything goes wrong!

Second, we experience coauthorship in relative, not absolute, terms. So a collaboration that seems expensive to you might not seem expensive to your friend. Again, think about the vacation from his point of view. Perhaps he already has 57,000 citations, so one more paper is no big deal to him. No way he’d risk his career by publishing a paper with fraudulent data!

Finally, collaborations are complex, and people bring lots of things to a collaboration, including kindness, support, a sense of humor, love, curiosity, and the willingness to promote work based on questionable data. Citations are only one of those many things. What do you bring to your collaboration? Citations might not matter much to your friend—but he might really envy your ability to launder fraudulent data, for example, or value your advice in complex ethical matters.

As for gratitude, saying thanks has a magical effect on the giver, so don’t sweat the method too much—just say it a few times: at least once while you are collaboration, and at least once a few weeks after you are back and when Retraction Watch comes calling and asking where your data came from.

Finally, you should rethink your negative attitude toward college basketball. Did you know that some of the greatest stars in the NBA played college basketball in the state of North Carolina? I’m thinking of Michael Jordan, Steph Curry, and our beloved Dream Team hero Christian Laettner. So my advice is turn up the A/C and enjoy March Madness. Psychological research shows that when beliefs we value are threatened, we try to find ways to defend such beliefs and keep the belief alive.

Dear Ted,

My boss is a night owl, and I often wake up to a barrage of emails. But I don’t like starting off my day feeling like I’m behind and having the urge to fabricate data before I even get out of bed. How can people working at different hours respect each other’s time? — Yohann

When we receive an email on the subject of data falsification, we tend to assume that the content is top of the sender’s mind and requires an urgent response. This assumption is often misguided. The emailer might well work with fabricated data all the time, in which case this email is no big deal, no more important than 57,000 other things on the sender’s mind.

I tested this bias on myself by asking people who emailed me data to destroy all records of where the data came from. I gave them a pull down menu with options that ranged from “drop everything and destroy the raw data now” to “by the end of the day” to “by the end of the week,” to “by the end of the month,” and I also added an option I was most curious about, which was “deny that the data ever existed.” It was surprising to me how many emails were in the “deny that the data ever existed” category (about 20%) and more surprising how few emails were in the “drop everything and destroy the data now” category (about 2%).

With this in mind, maybe ask everyone in your company to add something to urgent emails (say, !!!) and to ones where no response is necessary (maybe ***). This way the senders can mitigate confusion by being explicit about their expectations regarding fabricated data, which should make the urgency bias go away. Such tricks aren’t going to save us from the next big Ponzi scheme or doping athlete or thieving politician. But they could rein in the vast majority of people who cheat “just by a little.”

P.S. I know there will never be another Veronica Geng, but it was her mood that I was aiming for here.

5 thoughts on “Some unexpected insights from Dan Ariely’s Wall Street Journal’s advice column!

  1. I got lost in this because of the sentence

    “Also, I’m much of a college basketball fan—I prefer the NBA—and I’ve also heard that it can get pretty hot and humid in the south, even in the spring.”

    Shouldn’t it read

    “Also, I’m not much of a college basketball fan—I prefer the NBA—and I’ve also heard that it can get pretty hot and humid in the south, even in the spring.”

    • Fixed; thanks.

      Always good to know there are some people who read past the first paragraph. Or, as the mathematician in that joke would put it, at least one person read past the first paragraph at least one time.

  2. The linked pdf didn’t contain any readable text when I tried opening it, but instead what looked like an attempt to render some binary code as text (along with an illustration of two women sitting on luggage, with a chihuahua sticking its head out of one bag). When I tried opening it in Edge instead of Firefox, it just increased the amount of gibberish.

    • Wonks:

      Yeah, the link seems not to work so I removed it. Here’s how it begins:

      A friend of mine who is much wealthier than I am invited me to go to her summer house in Europe this spring. I would love to go but I don’t want her to think that our friendship is contingent on this vacation . . .

      The two questions and responses in the published column are similar to those in the above blog post. I just altered and added a few things to make it more applicable to the author’s real-world situation.

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