Links - 19th January 2020 (2)

Experiments in Dating : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "We went through lots and lots of emails of online dating. And we found that it most of the email was incredibly boring. Much like speed dating, right? People just don't know what to talk about. And we had one game in which we didn't allow people to just freely chat. We gave them a list of 20 questions, and then they could ask, but the questions were all interesting, right? People ask about the weather, and where do you go to school? They want to really ask, what's your sexual fantasies? And how many partners have you had? And what did you break up from the last one?... And we allowed people to only ask those questions. And the other side of the equation could say, No, I don't want to answer this… But because it was permissible. If you think about it it could be a social coordination issue. You get people to a room, and you don't tell them what to talk about they’ll talk about the weather… You say you only can talk about personal intimate stuff, it's a better equilibrium…
‘In fact, we did tiers... There are different levels of personal questions and you can ask anyone you want any level, but when you do that the other person is allowed to ask you one from that category as well… When people are on a real date, what happens? And the answer is, there's a lot of awkward silence. And you're praying for something to happen in the environment. In some sense, both of you implicitly are saying, I hope the waiter dropped a drink. So I can say look at that bozo who dropped a drink or whatever'...
‘I also think that bars have, the reason they have loud music is that first of all people could stand closer to each other physically. So if I need to shout it your ear I can get closer to you physically and have a sense of intimacy.’
‘It also helps also, by the way, if you're looking away, I can touch you to get your attention.’
‘And I also think it masks awkward silence. It's okay to be quiet and just listen to the music’...
'There was a lot of research in psychology that for a long time said that when you have spousal issues, you should try to do active listening. And you should then say, yes, darling, and let's talk about it and let's understand it and so on. And just before assuming I get married, there was a paper that came out and said, this is actually not a good idea. That a much better strategy is to say, yes, dear, you're right. It turns out this all active listening, just kind of get people to brew the problem and discuss the more you say, yes, dear you’re right is much more effective.'
‘So I'll tell you one of my key insights that I have, I believe I've learned, about if, about actually anyone, especially if a woman is upset about anything in the world is, men often launch into problem solving mode. So a woman says this happened at work and the man says, I'm going to call the guy and I'm going to yell at him. And we're going to fix this. And that's exactly the wrong thing to do in these cases, you have to be heard before you do this. So I believe that the very best thing to say is, a woman will talk for quite some time, my wife, she's upset and all that you have to say next is that must have been very hard for you.’
‘Mmm, and it's working for you.’
‘I don't know... But it implies that you are listening very carefully. And you're empathizing. And you'd like to hear more’"

Pushing the Envelope : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Popcorn... it comes in buckets. And these are large buckets. The average large bucket of popcorn has what, 6 cups I think of popcorn’
‘That’s the Canadian one did. The American ones are bigger’
‘I think you're right. I think it's probably got like eight or nine, eight or nine cups of popcorn. And the idea is a lot of people not just buy the stuff, but they eat it and eat all of it... me with my family of three plus friends struggle to finish one bucket, but lots of people actually consume the whole damn thing… why do people eat all of that stuff? When in fact, they know that it's not good for them?’
‘Well, it's available, and they paid for it already, no?’
‘Well, there is that. Plus the fact that there's absolutely nothing in the environment that questions why and when they should stop eating, right. So when you when you buy a bucket of popcorn, you make a meta decision to buy and to eat and you start eating and then you don't kind of stop at every 10 kernels and say, should I continue or not? You just go with the flow. Right? And so I said, is there a way in which we could intervene, create a flow or create a point at which people need to reevaluate that decision to continue eating popcorn. So what we did was we worked with a theater, with the concession stand. And did the following simple experiment. People came and asked for a bucket of popcorn. And the agent told them, Look, we don't have buckets, but I can give you the same popcorn in four bags... we kept track of how much popcorn people ate, and we asked them why they ate… we obviously found they ate a lot less. And they did that because what would now happen is that they will reach the end of a bag, and they will now need to decide that they wanted to open the next bag’...
‘When they bought the popcorn, they wanted to eat the whole thing. They bought a lot of it, but in the process itself, they basically stopped themselves... ‘We bring people in to gamble. We gave them gambling coupons... the one manipulation we did was the envelope manipulation. So what we did was we put all 100 coupons in one envelope, sealed it and gave it to them for some of the participants. For other participants, we took the same hundred coupons, divvied them up into 10 envelopes of 10 coupons each, again sealed them, and handed them out… people that had 100 coupons in one envelope tended to gamble about 56 of those away. The, I’d say there were about 20% of people that gambled the entire hundred coupons away. But when they had the 10 envelopes of 10 each, it turns out most of them opened one, two, perhaps one brave soul opened three. But then they exchanged the rest for cash and went home’"

Modifying Loss Aversion : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Everybody has the same amygdala response but there's a orbital frontal cortex activity’...
‘We know from other lesion study that if you have a damage in this area you become extremely impulsive.’
‘So this area basically control your emotional, the role of emotional in your behavior and you’re saying that people who had more activity there behaved more like what?’
‘If they had more activity they will be more like Mr. Spock, like the character of a volcano [Ed: Vulcan]. So we didn’t find any true Mr. Spock’
‘So nobody was Spoke but what you're saying is that the emotional reaction is basically common to everybody. And the real question is can people modulate it? And the people who could suppress it by a frontal brain active activation actually behave a bit more like Homo Economicus’...
‘I guess I have a quite a lot of it to be an Italian, probably in compared with my English friends I seem to have a very little orbital frontal activation’"

Those Calculating Cabdrivers! : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The people who had licensed the newer ones, had what's called a negative elasticity, which means wages go up, hours go down… They’re working a lot of hours when they weren't getting very many fares, like driving around, driving around trying to earn money. When they were getting lots of fares, you know, drop somebody off, somebody's hopping in the can, then they quit earlier because they hit their target faster.’
‘So in some sense when the weather is terrible, and they should be working, because there's nothing better to do, they actually did the opposite. When the weather was wonderful, and they could have spent a day off, they actually worked too many hours.’...
‘Basically, that's on the right track that they were, they were quitting on days, when they could have made a bunch more money continuing to drive. However, more experienced drivers exhibited essentially kind of a flat, they sort of created regular hours for themselves. So they were independent of wages.’
‘Okay, so they oh, regular hours. So they didn't care. They just basically moved to it. So they're not more rational, they just moved to a different irrational move’
‘They didn't move to a positive labor supply response. Although, by the way, in most studies, it's hard to find evidence that for males, that their overall amount of hours worked responds to wages, females do respond really strongly. So the finding of a zero response is actually the typical one. So experienced drivers were catching up to the norm, which is still a little bit puzzling, because you'd expect to see these positive responses. Working more when it really pays... We got hypothesis also from Max Weber, who writes about this, as well as Hicks, a famous labor economist. And they both talk about this idea that you know, if you cut a person’s ability to earn an hourly wage, they'll just work more hours’"

I'll Have What She's Having : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘What is this thing with the fat suits?’
‘Well, first off, we refer to them as the body prosthetics… they make people look larger than they normally would… [this example] takes our confederate, an actor, young woman who's normally a size 00, she's quite thin and quite trim and turns her into... she's like five feet tall and 100 pounds or something like that. And it turns her into someone that would have, that wears a size 16… If it was real she would look somewhere in the hundred and 70 pound range’…
‘There's been a lot of talk recently about about how the people that we dine with can influence what we eat.’
‘Like if they eat spicy food we eat spicy food?’
‘Or if they eat a lot we eat a lot, if they eat a little we eat a little, that sort of thing. But it's always been focused on on people, you know, in our families and our good friends and the people that we're choosing to dine with.’...
‘People have made some fairly controversial claims about how far that extends, even to the degree that you can be influenced by the amount of food that your friends are eating, even if they don't live in the same city… what we were interested in was more than just you know, what people that you know and care about are eating, how that's going to influence you. We wanted to look at what, how the influence of just totally random individuals on the streets sitting at tables beside you that you don't know, you've never interacted with, could they actually influence your eating behavior through their eating behavior?... the answer is yes. And dramatically so... Imagine you're going to the movies, and you stop at the snack bar on your way to the movies. There's someone in front of you in line, they order either a smaller amount of snack or a large amount… the basic result is that we order what others in our environment are ordering. So if they're ordering very little, we’ll order a little. If they're ordering a lot we will order a lot... we actually will consciously override that basic result, if the person in front of you is really large.’
‘So if they're very big, you don't order and they order a lot you don't order a lot... Is it because you say oh my goodness, this is what ordering a lot does to you, they become so fat. I don't want to do this’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. I think, you know, it also goes in the other way. If they order a little, you're not as inclined to order very little. So you'll take more like you would normally take than a very small amount.’
‘So maybe you say whatever they do, I don't want to do anything that they do, because it's clearly not not leading to good outcomes.’…
‘What we've been suggesting to everybody is that many of us are concerned that we don't want to eat with large friends. In fact, what you should be worried about is the skinny friend that eats a lot, because you'll just automatically do what they do’"

A Funny Thing Happened.... : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘The Catholic Church outsources prayer… the Catholic churches is not able to keep up with mass requests. And it appears to be the case that... there's a mass mass request... and they just don't have enough priests to keep up with the backlog.’
‘And they can’t just mix people together, like, pray for 150 people together at one time?’
‘They could, that would be, you know, that would be a very good solution. But given the sort of traditions of the church, it's one mass per request. There just happens to be a lot of Catholic priests in India… with a lot of time, and in need of need of money for their congregations.’
‘I see. So they basically send them the names over the internet and they pray for them remotely?’
‘Basically’
‘And is it as effective to have remote prayer as a near prayer?’
‘Well, according to the church, certainly right in God's eyes, you know, there's no differentiation’...
'The things that tend to be funny are when we're able to see them as a violation of some important principle. Well, at the same time seeing how the situation’s okay, and there's a lot of ways to make a situation okay. So just the fact that you know, something is a joke that is not real, conversely makes it funny and not offensive'...
'So the trick to humour is you want a violation, but you want to be happily far enough. So it's not offensive'"