They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? | How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn from Failure | A Delta Air Lines Pilot Noticed a Scared Young Passenger on Board His Flight. What Happened Next Was a Lesson for Every Leader | NYC Roommates Prank Diners With Fake Pop-Up Steak Restaurant

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They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? - The New Yorker

The half-bearded behavioral economist Dan Ariely tends to preface discussions of his work—which has inquired into the mechanisms of pain, manipulation, and lies—with a reminder that he comes by both his eccentric facial hair and his academic interests honestly. He tells a version of the story in the introduction to his breezy first book, “Predictably Irrational,” a patchwork of marketing advice and cerebral self-help. One afternoon in Israel, Ariely—an “18-year-old military trainee,” according to the Times—was nearly incinerated. “An explosion of a large magnesium flare, the kind used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my body covered with third-degree burns,” he writes. He spent three years in the hospital, a period that estranged him from the routine practices of everyday life. The nurses, for example, stripped his bandages all at once, as per the cliché. Ariely suspected that he might prefer a gradual removal, even if the result was a greater sum of agony. In an early psychological experiment he later conducted, he submitted this instinct to empirical review. He subsequently found that certain manipulations of an unpleasant experience might make it seem milder in hindsight. In onstage patter, he referred to a famous study in which researchers gave colonoscopy patients either a painful half-hour procedure or a painful half-hour procedure that concluded with a few additional minutes of lesser misery. The patients preferred the latter, and this provided a reliable punch line for Ariely, who liked to say that the secret was to “leave the probe in.” This was not, strictly speaking, optimal—why should we prefer the scenario with bonus pain? But all around Ariely people seemed trapped by a narrow understanding of human behavior. “If the nurses, with all their experience, misunderstood what constituted reality for the patients they cared so much about, perhaps other people similarly misunderstand the consequences of their behaviors,” he writes. “Predictably Irrational,” which was published in 2008, was an instant airport-book classic, and augured an extraordinarily successful career for Ariely as an enigmatic swami of the but-actually circuit.

Ariely was born in New York City in 1967 and grew up north of Tel Aviv; his father ran an import-export business. He studied psychology at Tel Aviv University, then returned to the United States for doctoral degrees in cognitive psychology at the University of North Carolina and in business administration at Duke. He liked to say that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning Israeli American psychologist, had pointed him in this direction. In the previous twenty years, Kahneman and his partner, Amos Tversky, had pioneered the field of “judgment and decision-making,” which revealed the rational-actor model of neoclassical economics to be a convenient fiction. (The colonoscopy study that Ariely loved, for example, was Kahneman’s.) Ariely, a wily character with a vivid origin story, presented himself as the natural heir to this new science of human folly. In 1998, with his pick of choice appointments, he accepted a position at M.I.T. Despite having little training in economics, he seemed poised to help renovate the profession. “In Dan’s early days, he was the most celebrated young intellectual academic,” a senior figure in the discipline told me. “I wouldn’t say he was known for being super careful, but he had a reputation as a serious scientist, and was considered the future of the field.”

The new discipline might have lent itself to a tragic view of life. Our preferences were arbitrary and incoherent; no narrator was reliable. What differentiated Ariely was his faith that we could be managed. “It is very sad that we are fallible, myopic, vindictive, and emotional,” he told me by e-mail. “But in my view this perspective also means, and this is the optimistic side, that we can do much better.” Take, for example, cheating. If people are utility-maximizing agents, they will fleece as much as they can get away with. Ariely believed, to the contrary, that a potential cheater has to balance two conflicting desires: the urge to max out his gains and the need to see himself as a good person. In experiments, Ariely found that most people cheat when given the opportunity—but just a little. Ariely, who does not shy from cutesiness, called this the “fudge factor.” In turn, he proposed, people might just need to be reminded that they aspire to be decent. In one of his most famous experiments, he asked students to score their own math tests. Half the students had first been asked to list the Ten Commandments. Although most could recall only a few, Ariely found that, in this group, “nobody cheated.” The insight was simple, the intervention subtle, and the consequences enormous.

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How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn from Failure - Harvard Business Review

Too many leaders live in fear of mistakes, missteps, and disappointments. But if you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn.

In May, right after he became CEO of Coca-Cola Co., James Quincey called upon rank-and-file managers to get beyond the fear of failure that had dogged the company since the “New Coke” fiasco of so many years ago. “If we’re not making mistakes,” he insisted, “we’re not trying hard enough.”

In June, even as his company was enjoying unparalleled success with its subscribers, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings worried that his fabulously valuable streaming service had too many hit shows and was canceling too few new shows. “Our hit ratio is too high right now,” he told a technology conference. “We have to take more risk…to try more crazy things…we should have a higher cancel rate overall.”

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A Delta Air Lines Pilot Noticed a Scared Young Passenger on Board His Flight. What Happened Next Was a Lesson for Every Leader - Inc.com

Traveling on an airplane can be stressful. Even if you aren't afraid of heights or flying, per se, there's still a lot to deal with.

One of the worst things is when your flight is delayed. As someone who travels pretty regularly, delays are not my favorite. That's because you usually don't know what's happening, and a delayed flight can really mess up your plans and turn what should otherwise be an enjoyable trip into a stressful mess.

Sometimes, however, you come across someone who makes things just a little less stressful. That's what happened on a Delta flight earlier this week when a young passenger got upset when the flight they were on was delayed due to mechanical issues.

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NYC Roommates Prank Diners With Fake Pop-Up Steak Restaurant | Entrepreneur - Entrepreneur

By Emily Rella • Sep 29, 2023

A group of friends in New York City may have pulled off the ultimate prank after opening a fake restaurant that began as a Google Maps joke, per the New York Times.

During the pandemic, roommates Willy Hopps and Mehran Jalali lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where they would often cook meals together, eventually labeling their apartment on Google Maps as "Mehran's Steak House."

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