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His new book, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, is, like his previous books, a diverting blend of first-person anecdote and self-help science, though this go-around he’s focused on how we fall victim to conspiracy theories. Ariely was drawn to the topic, he writes, after receiving an email accusing him of participating in a plot by global elites to thin the world’s population. That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s true that Ariely hobnobs with billionaires, advises governments on policy, and is interested in influencing human behavior at scale. He checks a number of conspiracy-villain boxes.
Ariely is happy to talk about the book, which he wrote while sequestered in a cabin in the Swiss Alps, taking long walks each morning to a coffee shop to think about what he wanted to say. He’s also happy to talk about The Irrational, on which he is a consulting producer. The show’s protagonist is a professor (at the fictional Wylton University, a stand-in for Duke, where Ariely is the James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics) and, like Ariely, he was severely burned as a young man. They’re both 50-something divorced guys with penchants for citing scientific literature in casual conversation. Some artistic license has been taken: In the show, the professor outwits a hostage-taker and gets shot at by an assassin. Apparently life on the lecture circuit lacked dramatic tension.
But that’s not what anyone wants to hear about right now. Instead Ariely has been fielding endless queries about the veracity of his studies. At the restaurant, he gets a message from a fact-checker at The New Yorker. In a couple of days an article will be published cataloging doubts about his research. A similar New York Times article will appear the same day. They follow a string of other stories, along with an Israeli TV news program, portraying Ariely as someone who plays fast and loose with the facts — or perhaps invents them entirely. Whereas once reporters were eager to write up the quotable prof’s latest study, now they want to cross-examine him about data collection. The headlines write themselves: Dishonesty Researcher Might Himself Be Dishonest.
Ariely is aware of the irony. And he knows that detractors who long considered him more showman than scientist delight at the prospect of his downfall. He is frustrated by the relentlessly negative news coverage and feels let down by those who believe the worst about him, though he has been reluctant to say so publicly, often turning down on-the-record interviews while trying to push back behind the scenes. “I do feel attacked,” he says. “I feel unfairly so.”
Meanwhile, Ariely’s been dealing with an investigation by his own university into his research, which dragged on for more than a year and a half. That investigation concluded that he failed to adequately vet findings and maintain records from the experiment in question, Ariely revealed this week, though he says Duke turned up no evidence that he fabricated data (for its part, the university has declined to comment on — or even confirm — its investigation).
Ever the analytical observer, Ariely expresses his emotions in percentages, estimating that he’s 20 percent “hurt” and 40 percent “amazed.” For the remaining percentage, he uses an analogy. “I feel like it’s Mount Everest,” he says. “It’s painful, and it will be frostbite and loss of a limb, but there’s some really important aspect of life that I’m experiencing.”
He’s retold the basic story of that incident many times. Apart from satisfying the audience’s curiosity, the explosion is central to his account of how he became a social scientist. He’s written that being unable to participate in normal teenage life left him feeling set apart from his peers: “I … started to observe the very activities that were once my daily routine as if I were an outsider.” Through it all, he wrote, “I held onto the part that was not changed — the part that still held for me the true definition of myself — my mind, ideas, and ways of thinking.”
Ariely usually emphasizes the aftermath rather than the accident itself. That’s led to confusion. Several reporters who wrote about Ariely in 2008, after his first book was published, stated that he was injured in the Israeli army (Ariely was born in New York but grew up in Israel). Raleigh’s News & Observer described him as “an 18-year-old Israeli fulfilling his country’s military requirement when a cache of magnesium flares exploded.” NPR called him an “18-year-old soldier in the Israeli Army.” The New York Times said he was an “18-year-old military trainee.”
He was never a soldier or a military trainee. When the accident occurred, Ariely was a member of a youth-service organization in Israel. The group has a tradition of preparing and displaying fire inscriptions in which words are formed with wire and cloth and then set ablaze. In a 2012 interview with Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, Ariely offered his most-detailed, public account of the accident: “I was in an apartment with one of the other members. I mixed the gunpowder and took out a little on a spoon and suddenly it all blew up.” In a 2015 essay for The Wall Street Journal titled “The Ordeal That Made Me a Student of Humanity,” he wrote that the year was 1984 and that he was 17: “Nobody knows exactly what happened, but a spark must have been struck somewhere.”
So why did those first batch of stories say he was a soldier? Ariely insists he never told anyone he was in the military. A search of news articles and interview transcripts turns up no direct quotes from Ariely making that claim. “There’s no quotes for that because it never happened,” he says. “Could it be that some reporters reported something wrongly? Absolutely.” Ariely says he was unaware of the errors because he avoids reading about himself. As for why he gave the wrong age for the accident in his book, he says the explosion happened when he was 17-and-a-half years old, and that he rounded up — though not, he contends, because he was trying to falsely imply that he was in the military.
After graduating from Tel Aviv University with a degree in psychology, Ariely went on to get a doctorate in cognitive psychology at the University of North Carolina and then a second doctorate, in business administration, at Duke. In graduate school, he was known as intense, charismatic, and brimming with ideas. “Every conversation with Dan was just eye-opening and interesting,” recalls Jonathan Levav, who was a graduate student at Duke with Ariely and is now a marketing professor at Stanford University. “He was a joy to work with.” Levav remembers someone comparing Ariely to Amos Tversky, a towering figure in the field. Ariely’s adviser at Duke, John Lynch, now a marketing professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, recalls a faculty member predicting that Ariely would become a star.
From the start, his research examined everyday phenomena. In one study, researchers posed as waiters to see whether ordering in a group causes diners to make different meal choices (it does). Another looked at whether students would choose deadlines with penalties to overcome procrastination (they did). The experiments were, in one sense, trivial: Why does it matter that you order fish instead of chicken when you’re out with friends? But Ariely, along with other social psychologists of the era, were attempting to zero in on subtle influences that shape our behavior. The upshot was that we are less logical, and far more suggestible, than we like to think.
In the late 1990s, after he was hired by the business school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ariely remembers, Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the university’s renowned Media Lab, asked him how his research was going to change the world. “This was not an academic question, right?” Ariely says. “The academic question is, ‘What journals do you see yourself publishing in?’” He thought about it for a week and decided that what he hated most was inefficiency. “Every time that people underperform, compared to where they could have been, I see this as a waste,” he says. Ariely, who spent a significant portion of his young-adult life in a hospital bed, wanted to optimize human behavior — to make the most of each day. He would later join the Media Lab, which bills itself as an “interdisciplinary creative playground rooted squarely in academic rigor” and whose research has been supported by corporations like Samsung, L’Oréal, and Comcast. “I started meeting very high-level people who were thinking about big topics in interesting ways,” he says. “And we had some things that could help them, but we were missing a lot.”
His time at the Media Lab was marred by the fallout from a controversial experiment. In a 2006 study, subjects were given a pill that they were told was a new, fast-acting painkiller but was really a placebo. One group was told that the pill cost $2.50, while another was told it cost 10 cents. Each group was given electric shocks to the wrist after taking the pill and asked to rate the amount of pain relief. The group given the “more expensive” pill reported it was more effective, an illustration of both the power of placebo and the notion that costlier products are superior.
A subject complained about the experiment, and it later turned out that a research assistant hadn’t gone through the required certification to be involved, according to Walter Bender, a former executive director of the Media Lab who was on MIT’s Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects at the time. As a result, Ariely was forbidden from collecting data for a year. “Certainly there was a screw-up, and Dan paid a price for the screw-up and moved on,” Bender says. Ariely says he isn’t sure what the issue was but acknowledges there was a problem. “I don’t have a good memory of what exactly they complained about,” adding that he believed it was a “very minor” issue.
Ariely left MIT and returned to Duke in 2008. He says he was not forced out by the university and that, by then, his research privileges had been restored. According to Ariely, he just got a better offer. Bender says the Media Lab was “sad to see him go.” It was around that time that Ariely, as predicted, became a star, with the publication of Predictably Irrational and with his subsequent viral TED Talk. His mainstream prominence helped attract sponsors for his Duke lab, the Center for Advanced Hindsight. The idea for the center was born in the mid-1990s but took off after he arrived at Duke. The administration gave him wide latitude in how the center was run and freed him from the typical duties of a professor, like teaching classes and serving on committees. “I picked my own path, and it worked well for me and the university,” he says. “They let me do it because the people in charge just trusted me.” Also, he brought in lots of money. Like the Media Lab, Ariely’s center regularly works with big companies, including Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, and MetLife, which pay millions for “highly tailored” research.
The center is located on the second floor of a red-brick former textile mill not far from Duke’s campus. In 2019, it had more than 40 employees; these days, it’s about half that number. The decor is tech start-up meets elementary-school library. There are whiteboards adorned with yellow sticky notes. An acoustic guitar leans against a purple sectional, as if a meeting on sunk-cost fallacy might segue into a singalong. In the center’s kitchen, a photo of a wide-eyed Ariely is taped over the sink with the message: “Clean up your dishes!! (I’m watching you …)” It’s the sort of intervention you can imagine Ariely studying, tracking the number of plates and mugs left in the sink with and without his supervisory visage.
By all accounts, Ariely is not a micromanager. The center’s members are encouraged to take on months-long passion projects when they’re feeling burned out. “Basically, my management style is that I trust them,” he says. “I say: ‘When you need me, just tell me and I’ll be there for anything you need — brainstorming ideas, study design, whatever. But if you don’t need me, you don’t need to spend your time reporting to me.’” Ariely is on the road much of the time, but when he is present at the center he occupies a small, cluttered office with unopened packages stacked on the floor and mementos lining the shelves. On his desk is one of the fake prescription bottles, filled with peppermints, he had made to promote his book on dishonesty. “Dr. Ariely” is listed as the treating physician, and, per the label, the pills cure a range of ailments, including confusion, memory loss, and erectile dysfunction.
On the day a reporter stopped by, a message board facing the center’s entrance read “BACKGROUND ONLY, NOT FOR ATTRIBUTION, OFF THE RECORD.” It’s an anxious time at the center, and reporters, who in the past lined up to get the scoop on some clever new finding, have lately been asking tough questions about Ariely’s research. Some current and former employees of the center will say — though not for attribution — that they’re worried about the center’s future. They’re worried not because of any wrongdoing at the center itself; in fact, they say that its procedures for handling data are more rigorous than they were a decade ago. But they fear that the center’s identity is so closely tied to its founder’s reputation that, if Ariely falls, what he’s built may fall with him.
But did it actually work? In 2020, an attempted replication of the effect found that it did not. In fact, multiple attempts to replicate the 2012 finding all failed (though Ariely points to evidence in a recent, unpublished paper, on which he is a co-author, indicating that the effect might be real). The authors of the attempted replication posted the original data from the 2012 study, which was then scrutinized by a group of anonymous researchers who found that the data, or some of it anyway, had clearly been faked. They passed the data along to the Data Colada team. There were multiple red flags. For instance, the number of miles customers said they’d driven was unrealistically uniform. About the same number of people drove 40,000 miles as drove 500 miles. No actual sampling would look like that — but randomly generated data would. Two different fonts were used in the file, apparently because whoever fudged the numbers wasn’t being careful.
In short, there is no doubt that the data were faked. The only question is, who did it?
There is no nice way of saying it: Have you committed fraud in an academic paper?
In Ariely’s response to the Data Colada revelations, he wrote that he “did not suspect any problems with the data,” but that he didn’t “test the data for irregularities, which after this painful lesson,” he will “start doing regularly.” He wrote that the insurance company had collected and anonymized the data it sent to him. “This was the data file that was used for the analysis and then shared publicly.” More information has since emerged. BuzzFeed reported in 2021 that the insurance company, described in the paper as being located “in the southeastern United States” was The Hartford, an insurance company located in Connecticut. At the time the company confirmed that it had conducted a “small project” with Ariely but couldn’t locate the data in question. Then, last July, NPR’s Planet Money reported that The Hartford had found the original data. In a statement, The Hartford wrote that, in May 2008, someone at the company emailed a set of data to Ariely. Some of that data, the statement said, was used for the 2012 paper, but some appeared to have been fabricated. Notably, according to The Hartford, the data sent to Ariely were only for 6,000 vehicles — not 20,000, as was reported in the paper. What’s more, they concluded that the data Ariely was sent “does not contain a statistically significant difference” between those who signed at the top and those who signed at the bottom, thus undermining the since-retracted paper’s conclusion.
Ariely says he remembers almost nothing about the study, noting that it’s been more than a decade. He doesn’t remember how he came to work with The Hartford. He doesn’t recall opening the data file. He’s not sure whether someone at his center worked on the analysis. Ariely doesn’t usually analyze data himself, in part because of his injuries. “I have a very, very vague memory that the forms arrived without the data,” he says. “I have a vague memory that they came separately, either before or after the data, but not at the same time.”
One of Ariely’s co-authors, Max Bazerman, questioned the data before the study was published. In an email Bazerman sent to his co-authors on March 6, 2011, he noted that “means for the number of miles driven in a year seem enormous — twice what I would have expected. Am I simply wrong, is the sample unusual, or is there an error in recording the data?” Another co-author, Nina Mazar, asked Ariely in which state the study was conducted. A third co-author, Lisa Shu, asked if it was possible to include the forms sent to customers in an appendix in the paper. Ariely responded that it was “an older population mostly in Florida — but we can’t tell how we got that data, who was the population (they were all AARP members) — and we also can’t show the forms.” He assured his co-authors that “the milage [sic] are correct.”
How did he know that the data was from AARP members who lived mostly in Florida? That information isn’t in the file, nor is it mentioned in the study, even though it seems relevant. Ariely says now that he doesn’t know: “My guess is that the speculations came from discussions I had with the people from The Hartford.” (A spokeswoman for The Hartford declined to comment beyond the company’s written statement.) The file with driving data lists Dan Ariely as the creator and the date and time as February 13, 2011 — a Sunday — at 8:58 a.m. He sent the file to Mazar three days later. According to Ariely, there were other computers at the center that would have listed him as the creator of the file even if he hadn’t been the one to create it. He also says that he no longer has the original back-and-forth from The Hartford, nor does he know who had access to the dataset during the time between when he received it and when he shared it with his co-authors. The Hartford said that its last communication with Ariely was in February 2009, two years before Ariely emailed the dataset to Mazar.
Ariely told Data Colada that “none of my co-authors were involved,” and the sequence of events appears to support that. It’s hard to see how any of them would have had access to the data before he sent it to Mazar — and, by that point, it had already been manipulated.
One of those co-authors is Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor whose research was also called into question by the Data Colada team and who has been suspended by the university following an investigation into a number of her studies (Gino has denied wrongdoing and has filed a lawsuit against Harvard and Data Colada). In her statement to Data Colada in 2021, Gino wrote that she was “not involved in conversations with the insurance company that conducted the field experiment, nor in any of the steps of running the study or analyzing the data.” Ariely and Gino have remained in touch while each deals with allegations about their research practices. “Mostly it’s been a discussion where she is telling me about her emotional state, which you can assume is tough, and trying to think about what could happen,” Ariely says.
Ariely told Duke investigators in 2022 that the “best suspicion I have” is that someone at The Hartford made a mistake and then made changes to the data to cover it up (in its statement, The Hartford said that there “appear to be significant changes made to the size, shape, and characteristics of our data after we provided it and without our knowledge or consent”). He later suggested that a research assistant could be responsible. What incentive would a research assistant have to fake data? And why would he or she take that risk? “What about me?” Ariely says with a laugh. “I not only did it, but I invited an investigation into that?” In other words, why isn’t it equally ridiculous that he engaged in such a sloppy deception? What would Ariely, already an established name in the field, have to gain by taking such a wild risk on a study that he insists didn’t mean that much to him? As for what really happened, he says he doesn’t know and, at this point, doesn’t expect to ever learn the truth. “I don’t want to speculate on who did it without having solid evidence,” he says. “I will say that I tried to talk to everybody that I thought is relevant and it got me nowhere.”
Duke’s recently completed investigation, according to Ariely, discovered what was already obvious: The odometer readings in the study were manipulated. In a statement, Ariely said the university found “no evidence to show I was responsible for data falsification or knowingly used falsified data,” but that he “should have more thoroughly vetted the data and more diligently stored records about the data.” How the university arrived at that determination isn’t clear, and a Duke spokesman said via email that “we are not in a position to confirm or fact-check anything on this,” leaving Ariely — the subject of the investigation — as the only source of information about the university’s findings.
In a recent interview, Pyle, who no longer works as Delta Dental’s national spokesman, said that no report with that data had been “blessed or reviewed” by the network. “I don’t question whether he had a conversation with an executive who might have said something like that,” Pyle says now. “I can see how that could have happened.” Janet Schwartz, who was the primary researcher in touch with Delta Dental at the time and is now executive director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, says she was in the meeting when the statistic was mentioned. “I do remember the statement about the X-rays because I was like, ‘Oh my god, I feel like they take these X-rays and find things all the time,’” she says. (Schwartz finds the idea that Ariely would lie about data for The Hartford study “completely preposterous.”)
A more substantial concern was raised about one of Ariely’s signature findings. In a 2008 study, subjects were asked to report their scores on a series of self-timed math puzzles and told that two randomly selected participants would earn $10 for each correctly solved puzzle. What Ariely and his co-authors wanted to know is whether, if given the opportunity, subjects would inflate the number of correct answers. Before they completed the puzzles, one group of subjects was asked to write down 10 books they read in high school while another group was asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. The idea was that prompting subjects to think about morality might cause them to report their scores more honestly. It worked: The Ten Commandments group cheated less.
In two of Ariely’s books, he writes that the experiments took place at the University of California at Los Angeles. That was somewhat odd considering that Ariely didn’t work for UCLA and neither did his two co-authors, On Amir, a marketing professor at the University of California at San Diego, and Mazar, who was also a co-author on The Hartford insurance study and is a marketing professor at Boston University. If you read Predictably Irrational, it sounds as if the authors themselves were present (“Nina, On, and I brought a group of participants together in a lab at UCLA …"). They were not. The researcher responsible for carrying out the experiment, according to Ariely, was Aimee Drolet Rossi, a marketing professor at UCLA. But Rossi says she has no memory of being involved in the experiment and wonders why, if she was indeed the one to carry it out, she wasn’t listed as a co-author. Rossi says she never even read the study until it was brought to her attention by researchers who tried (and failed) in 2018 to replicate the result. Rossi is thanked in the acknowledgments — though her name is misspelled — for “help in conducting the experiments,” along with three others.
During the mid-2000s, when the experiment would have been conducted, Rossi coordinated an annual survey event at UCLA in which undergraduates would gather in a 400-seat lecture hall and fill out a packet of surveys, mostly from professors and graduate students in the marketing department. The surveys tended to be straightforward. “You can have them rate products or tell you if they like an ad or not,” she says. “Pure marketing stuff.” The undergraduates would zip through the packets and receive $15 or $20 for their effort. Rossi doesn’t believe it would have been reasonable to conduct the more subtle Ten Commandments experiment during that session. Rossi allows that it’s “possible it was run in the survey thing but that it could not have been run in the manner” in which it was described in the paper. There’s no record that the surveys ran during that period, she says, and so there’s no way to check.
Rossi and Ariely have known each other for a long time. Rossi wrote in an email to researchers who were looking into the Ten Commandments study that, because she and Ariely’s ex-wife are friends, “Dan’s been dead to me for years.” She called him a “smart guy but a charlatan.” When Rossi first heard about Ariely’s forthcoming book, Misbelief, she thought that he might be targeting her in its pages. “Oh, this new book is going to probably say I am misinformed about my own actions,” she says. (Rossi is not mentioned in the book.)
In 2022, when an Israeli television show was investigating Ariely, he emailed Rossi to see if she remembered the study and suggested that they had worked on other projects together, but he wasn’t sure. He hoped she would tell the Israeli reporter that it was at least possible she had run the study. Rossi wrote back: “We have no research history.” She ran a pilot for a possible project with Ariely, but “you did nothing with it,” she wrote to him. Ariely asked if she remembered the names of the research assistants who might have helped with data collection for the survey sessions. Rossi responded: “There was none. That’s the point. The study was not conducted as you described in the paper.” She also asked him not to contact her again.
Ariely remembers Rossi running the study as a favor. So does Amir, one of his co-authors. “When Dan said ‘Oh, Aimee ran this for us at UCLA,’ it didn’t seem odd because they were friends,” he says. He also remembers hearing that Rossi complained that her name was misspelled shortly after the paper was published. “There was a lot of communication [between Rossi and Ariely] back then,” he says. Another person thanked in the acknowledgments is Daniel Berger-Jones, an actor who worked as a research assistant for Ariely around that period. “I did all kinds of weird stuff for him, and I was peripherally involved with a bunch of studies,” he says. Berger-Jones remembers packing up surveys to send to UCLA for the experiment. That stuck in his mind because he made a joke to another research assistant about whether people in Los Angeles would be familiar with the Ten Commandments. Berger-Jones doesn’t recall whether the surveys were returned or anything else about that study. “I wish I had more details,” he says. “But I can guarantee you that that happened.”
Another clue is that, in an earlier draft of the questions given to subjects and provided to The Chronicle by Ariely and his co-authors, a third group was asked to write “10 things that you DON’T like about UCLA” before completing the puzzles. That group was eliminated from the final paper, according to the authors, at the suggestion of the Journal of Marketing Research, which published the paper. That might explain why the number of subjects, 229, was significantly lower than the 400 students in a typical survey run at UCLA. No one seems to know what happened to the completed surveys or if the promised money was actually paid to subjects (though subjects were asked to provide their names and emails on the forms, presumably so they could be contacted later for payment). In October, the American Marketing Association, the publisher of the journal, began a review of the study and asked the authors to provide all available data used in their research “consonant with past and current policies for articles that come under scrutiny.”
More troubling for Ariely, though, are the formerly close colleagues who no longer wish to be associated with him. Among them is George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and a foundational figure in behavioral economics. In the Upside of Irrationality, Ariely calls Loewenstein “my role model.” Loewenstein and Ariely collaborated on several studies in the 2000s, including an eyebrow-raising one on how sexual arousal affects judgment in male college students. In the study, students were shown erotic photographs, encouraged to masturbate, and then asked questions like “Is a woman sexy when she’s sweating?” along with other, more prurient inquiries. The researchers found that sexual stimulation lowered young men’s inhibitions and messed with their moral compass.
In a recent interview, Loewenstein praised Ariely as an “incredibly creative researcher, just overflowing with ideas and really great at making connections.” But he also made clear that he’s lost faith in Ariely’s work. After the Data Colada post, Loewenstein says he asked Ariely to no longer list him as a co-author on his Google Scholar page. Loewenstein says he never saw the raw data for the arousal study but believes it took place because he later saw the materials that were given to subjects, including computers set up so that subjects could answer the survey with one hand. But that doesn’t mean he remains certain about the results. “I have no idea if the data are real,” Loewenstein says. “I can’t feel confident about anything where he collected and analyzed the data.”
Daniel Kahneman was another early influence on Ariely. The Nobelist and research partner of Amos Tversky, to whom Ariely was compared early in his career, told The New York Times in 2008 that Ariely was “one of the most innovative people in his generation.” When contacted for this article, Kahneman replied via email: “I am sorry, but I would rather not discuss Dan Ariely.” Other colleagues also declined interview requests.
Those who’ve worked with Ariely over the years, including some who credit him with getting their careers off the ground, find themselves in the awkward position of trying to square their generally positive impression of Ariely with the allegations. “In all my years of knowing Dan as a friend, colleague, and collaborator, I’ve never seen him do anything that would indicate that he’s capable of this,” says David Pizarro, a psychology professor at Cornell University who studies moral judgment and is a co-host of the Very Bad Wizards podcast. At the same time, Pizarro says he’s “genuinely uncertain” what might explain The Hartford data. Levav, the Stanford marketing professor, believes Ariely might be the single best public speaker in behavioral economics. “He’s an outstanding storyteller. He’s an outstanding social scientist,” says Levav, who was a co-author of a study with Ariely on personal satisfaction and regret. Still, he doesn’t downplay the damage to Ariely’s reputation: “It’s a troubling situation and I’m sad about it.”
John Lynch was Ariely’s adviser at Duke and helped recruit him back to the university from MIT. Ariely once gave Lynch a Sigmund Freud doll with a note calling him “my ego and my superego.” Lynch argues that some of the news coverage of Ariely has been unfair and that supposed discrepancies might be explained by the vagaries of memory. “How can I know what the hell Dan did?” he says. “But it’s so inconsistent with other things I know.” Also, as Lynch points out, whoever committed the fraud did a clumsy job. “How would somebody, unless you’re an idiot, fake the data in that way?” he asks. The uniformity of the distribution, the different fonts — setting aside the ethical dimension, it’s hard for Lynch to believe Ariely would be that careless. He does wonder whether Ariely’s legendary productivity, his proclivity to juggle a dozen projects at once, might be to blame. “For sure, he’s guilty of publishing too much,” Lynch says. “I don’t think anybody who publishes that much can be on top of everything they’re doing.”
Ariely hasn’t offered, even to longtime friends, a solid explanation of what might have happened, and, as the evidence piles up, defending him has become a challenge. Gal Zauberman, a marketing professor at Yale University, met Ariely in the 1990s when they were both at the University of North Carolina. “We essentially learned psychology together. We learned it was fun and it was all exciting and new,” he says. Back then everyone wanted to work with Ariely, or just be around him, and, later, they watched with awe as his public stature grew exponentially. “He became so famous so quickly,” Zauberman recalls. The fact that Ariely is in the spotlight, that he “flew close to the sun,” as Zauberman puts it, is part of what’s generating such intense interest in the allegations against him. “I agree that there is a pile-on, but this is a serious allegation no matter what,” he says. “There is no nice way of saying it: Have you committed fraud in an academic paper?”
In 2022, after an initial inquiry found that there was “sufficient evidence of the alleged misconduct to warrant a full investigation,” Duke increased its oversight of Ariely’s center, which had previously operated with a remarkable degree of independence. Its training and data-management practices were examined by the administration, and Ariely was told to submit regular reports on research taking place at the center. He was also required to participate in an eight-week-long course on professionalism and integrity at Washington University in St. Louis — a humbling mandate for a scholar who has written about the psychology of integrity. Among those encouraged to take part in the program, according to its website, are researchers who “have been investigated for noncompliance or misconduct and wish to move forward constructively.”
Now that Duke has found him responsible for research misconduct — though not falsification — it remains to be seen what additional punitive actions might be taken. Ariely intends to continue as director of the center and, in his statement about the university’s findings, said he was “grateful to Duke for their efforts to shed light on this matter” and that he is “looking forward to resuming [his] work.”
In truth, Ariely’s work never stopped. Along with running the center, he is a co-founder of Irrational Capital, an investment research firm that “applies workplace behavioral science” to figure out which companies are treating their employees well and how that’s connected to their stock performance. He’s also a co-founder of two social-science-consulting firms, BEWorks and Irrational Labs. He’s the chief behavioral officer of Epilog, an app that guides people through end-of-life medical-care decisions. He reviews scripts for The Irrational — which was recently renewed by NBC for a second season — and gives feedback on how the science is presented. Ariely has been flying back-and-forth to Israel since the outbreak of the conflict there, working, he says, with nongovernmental agencies and counseling residents of two kibbutzim targeted by Hamas. His schedule is often crammed from early morning to late evening. He travels frequently enough that he has someone drive his car around the block every so often to keep the battery charged.
I regret trusting the data. That’s the first regret, and everything follows from there.
But his work outside the university rests on his reputation as a researcher. He’s not merely a science communicator or a consultant or a corporate speaker; he’s a scientist whose work has been cited tens of thousands of times. He’s attempting to uncover the mysteries of human behavior, to figure out why we do what we do. His credibility hinges on the sincerity of that search. If he fudges the numbers when it fits his purposes, that would undermine the reputation he has built and the success he has enjoyed. It would cut to the core of his persona and cast suspicion on everything he’s done — even if it’s only the data for one study in one paper published more than a decade ago.
Ariely knows that. He hopes that, in time, the lingering questions about The Hartford study will be overshadowed by the research he’s doing, the companies he’s helping, the books he’s writing. But he doesn’t believe people will ever forget. Over coffee one morning at a cafe near his center, Ariely describes several projects he’s excited about, including advising a smartwatch manufacturer on how to get people to be more active and working with a start-up to create a bathroom scale with no display. His enthusiasm for new ideas, he says, is undimmed. But he’s resigned to the likelihood that doubts about The Hartford study will forever dog him. “And that’s a sad thought, right?” he says. “On my grave it will say ‘In 2012, he co-authored the paper that was later found out had falsified data.’” Ariely chuckles and frowns. He compares the situation to the accident that altered his life almost four decades ago. “Like my scars, it will never go away,” he says. “It’s always here. And you just have to deal with this and move forward.”