Dan Ariely
He taught a generation that we get things wrong in the same directions every time β free chocolate, phantom subscriptions, the shelf you built and can't stop admiring. Then the most famous honesty study of his career turned out to be built on numbers nobody can account for. Six games for people who read the book and then read what happened next.
"Money, as it turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well." β Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational (2008)
π The Record
Not a takedown and not a defence β just the sequence, because the sequence is the most interesting behavioral economics story of the last twenty years, and half the games here are built out of it.
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2008
Predictably Irrational arrives and behavioral economics goes mainstream. Truffles and Hershey's Kisses, The Economist's phantom print edition, the free shipping that worked everywhere but France. A decade of TED talks, columns and consulting follows.
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2012
A paper in PNAS with Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman reports that moving an honesty signature to the top of a form makes people lie less. Its headline study uses odometer readings from real auto-insurance customers. Governments and companies start redesigning real paperwork around it.
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2018
Nineteen labs and 4,674 participants try to reproduce his celebrated 2008 result that recalling the Ten Commandments cuts cheating. They find nothing β if anything, a hair the other way. No fraud involved: this is just the ordinary, unglamorous way a beloved finding dies.
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2020
The original authors, joined by new collaborators, publish six fresh studies in PNAS. Signing first does not reduce dishonesty. Researchers ask to see the raw data behind the 2012 field experiment.
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August 2021
Data Colada β Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons β publishes "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty." The mileage is spread perfectly evenly, which real driving never is. Half the rows are near-duplicates of the other half, typed in Cambria where the originals are in Calibri.
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September 2021
PNAS retracts the paper. All five authors agree, and agree that Ariely alone held the data before passing it to Mazar for analysis. He says he did not fabricate it and that the insurer supplied it that way. Separately that year, Psychological Science flags his 2004 paper "Effort for Payment" β a note of concern, not a retraction, over statistics that don't survive recalculation.
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2023
NPR's Planet Money obtains the dataset The Hartford says it actually sent him: roughly 3,700 policies. The published study used more than 13,000. In June, Data Colada turns to Francesca Gino, alleging fabricated data across four of her papers; Harvard places her on leave.
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January 2024
Ariely says Duke's confidential investigation concluded the data were falsified but found no evidence that he fabricated them or knowingly used fabricated data β while holding him responsible for research misconduct over failing to properly vet the findings and keep records. Duke has not released the report.
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May 2025
Harvard revokes Francesca Gino's tenure, the first time in decades. She continues to deny falsifying or fabricating any data; her defamation claims against Harvard and against Data Colada were dismissed in 2024, and the two sides remain in court.
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January 2026
Ariely's name appears hundreds of times in the Justice Department's release of the Epstein files, in correspondence spanning 2010 to 2018. He says the contact was infrequent and largely logistical, that there was no financial, professional or ongoing relationship, and that he had no connection to any criminal activity. Nothing released so far indicates wrongdoing on his part.
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Today
He is still the James B. Duke Professor at Duke, still writing and still on stage. His 2023 book Misbelief is about why rational people come to believe things that aren't true β a subject he now approaches from an unusually complicated angle.