You may recall that I am an unabashed Dan Ariely fan (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). It’s only fair that I give equal time to his critics.
A major piece by Alan Wolfe in TNR takes a quite skeptical look at the new economics and the pursuit of happiness:
Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational [link] is the latest book by a behavioral economist to hit the jackpot. The reason for its popularity is not hard to discover. The experiments that it describes are as titillating as they are ingenious. Here is one of them. People were asked some rather suggestive questions, such as whether they would find it exciting to spank their sexual partners or to be tied up by them during the sexual act. After their answers were duly recorded, they were asked if they would be willing to respond to the same questions, only this time at the height of sexual arousal produced by masturbation. It turns out that when we are aroused we are completely different than when we are not aroused: we are more hospitable to risk, more irresponsible, more emotional. Ariely therefore concludes that people who have no idea what they will think or do when aroused cannot know themselves very well, and the implications are dramatic: “Our models of human behavior need to be rethought. Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves.”
Before one concludes that behavioral economists are obsessed with sex, it should be pointed out that the masturbation experiment is the only one discussed by Ariely that requires this particular kind of self-help. The others are designed to show just how odd our behavior can be in the circumstances of everyday life. Ariely and his colleagues set up a stand and offer Lindt truffles for 15 cents and Hershey’s Kisses for a penny: 73 percent of their customers choose the former, 27 percent the latter. Then they lower the price of the truffle to 14 cents and offer the Hershey Kiss for free, and now 69 percent choose the Kiss and only 31 percent the truffle. Calculating utility cannot explain this result. In both cases, the cost difference is identical. So it seems that we attach an almost mystical meaning to the idea of getting something for nothing. Zero is not just another number. It plays tricks with our rational minds.
Unfortunately:
Ariely is obligated to remind his readers, most of whom are neither psychologists nor economists, of the problems of selection bias that follow from his over- reliance on students as subjects. But he fails to do so. In fact, he does the opposite: he generalizes from MIT classrooms to humankind as a whole, and with abandon. This might be called the technique of the Big Slip, gliding imperceptibly from a controlled and artificial experiment to breathtaking generalizations about matters that have puzzled philosophers and theologians through the ages. It makes for entertaining reading. Alas, it tells us little about the kind of creatures we are….
The problem is also that they are in college or graduate school and not yet out in the world. Experience with the world teaches us many things. One of them might be how to better control our emotions during sexual arousal. Another lesson is that there is no such thing as a free Hershey’s Kiss. (Although Ariely used MIT students for one of his experiments about free candy–indeed, he even used nine- year-old trick-or-treaters–he also used shoppers in a mall.) A third lesson is that doors in life close as you get older. And a fourth is that there are some things you simply cannot postpone. This is usually called learning, which may confidently be defined as absorbing experiences so that the decisions you make are neither predictable nor irrational.
The clincher:
Dan Ariely’s contribution is also, in its own way, quite conventional. It is true that he challenges the near-religious conviction with which economists cling to the idea of rationality. But Ariely’s subjects are consumers all the same, constantly on the lookout for bargains, even if they are not always shrewd enough to obtain them…The errors of judgment they make are small ones. Little is at stake in the questions they are asked about chocolate candies, and even less because the circumstances in which they are asked those questions are so artificial. When it comes to human understanding, the ambitions of the revolution are paltry. What began as a movement marked by a curious, if not actually humanistic, sensibility has transformed itself into a one-dimensional vision of human nature in which the perfect rationality of neoclassical economics is replaced by an equally simple-minded conception of human beings as either happiness maximizers or perfect fools.
Ariely’s contribution could not be more different from the work of most neoclassical economists: he is willing to write for a popular audience and thus to face the special scorn that academics reserve for those who sell many books. (Even here, though, Milton Friedman was the pioneer.) …
Reading the insistence of Ariely and others who maintain that everyone who studied human beings before behavioral economics came along was wrong, I conclude that we should once and for all stop calling for revolutions in our understanding of ourselves, and end this remarkable presumption. In the long history of humankind, the social sciences were developed only recently, but we have been trying to figure ourselves out since we first began to think. It defies the imagination that one new methodology or theoretical assumption is going to topple all previous efforts to understand the human condition. Sometimes revolutions in our understanding of the world do happen–they tell me that Albert Einstein led one (and that, having done so, he spent the rest of his life running down the wrong paths)–but they are rare in the physical sciences, and they are next to nonexistent in the social sciences. Human beings are indeed charming and perverse and altogether fascinating creatures, and the study of ourselves is among the richest of intellectual endeavors. We ought to give ourselves a bit more credit than the revolutionists of the social sciences extend to us: we pursue many goals at the same time, and we do so in all kinds of predictable and unpredictable ways.
And yet it is possible to understand us–slowly, patiently, in fits and starts, and with due respect for those who have been studying us for so long. That is why the history of social theory is still of philosophical interest, whereas the history of natural science is of almost no scientific interest: we still repair urgently to Weber and Durkheim, but we may safely forget about phlogiston. In both the social scientific and humanistic studies of human existence, it is not a revolution that we need. What we need are observations and suggestions and ideas, collected one at a time, by different people, from different disciplines, with different methodologies. That is not sexy, but neither is it easy.
Predictably, I’m unpersuaded. Ariely isn’t proposing a revolution. He’s written a non academic book designed for a broad audience. His work should be tested; he advocates testing.
Let the evolution begin!
RELATED: He has been a media darling lately. Last weekend on NPR (on how we are over-reacting to gas prices) and in the NYTimes (on the power of free).