Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things by Dan Ariely

“First, when we consume information, we need to put on heavy-duty suspicion glasses.” - Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely doesn’t want you to believe.

Instead, he wants you to not engage in misbelief, which he defines as “a distorted lens through which people begin to view the world, reason about the world, and then describe the world to others.” His book published in September 2023 looks at misbelief via a few of the big conspiracy theories – alien abduction, Flat-Earth Theory, the Illuminati, JFK and QAnon. But the bulk of the attention is on conspiracies related to COVID, which has been the source of 1 of the 2 biggest public challenges Ariely has faced in the 2020s.

The first challenge arose from the factors that made Dan Ariely the perfect mascot for social science. His tenured professorship at Duke University, multiple best selling books on irrationality, and consultative work with the Davos crowd all speak to his success. He blends humor, scholarship and showmanship into a captivating stage presence. His distinctive scars and half-beard from a burn accident suffered as a teenager make him easy to recognize and hard to forget.

All of these factors have also made Ariely one of the most vilified people in COVID conspiracy circles. Videos of him making a modest proposal in 2017 to reduce demand for medical services by increasing smoking and stress and slowing down ambulances were recut into sinister plans to reduce populations. Work with the Gates Foundation on other topics were recast into collaboration to create evil 5G COVID vaccines. Ariely’s government advisory work was reimagined into his serving as a mastermind in these conspiracies. And the reason for his evil? Why, the teenage accident, of course, and how it made him hate those with unsullied bodies. “The research”, as they say, is quite clear. Ariely, of course, denies all of this at length and seems quite credible in doing so.

Ariely’s examination of this phenomenon through this challenge is the spine of the book. While his “funnel of misbelief” (emotional, cognitive, personality, and social elements that trap adherents) uses a mix of academic literature, personal reflections, and examination of online materials, the most interesting recurring element is his engagement with some of his antagonists. He gets to know and even befriends some of the people who believe he should be put on trial and suffer a public execution. His ability to portray his own humanity, and that of his would-be prosecutors, creates empathy that makes for compelling reading. A great example is Ariely describing his lack of intuition regarding how hard it would be to get folks deep into conspiracy thinking to participate in institutional research. His spending thousands of dollars to get six (yes, 6, 1 less than 7) participants is hilarious and humanizing.

This skill and willingness to poke fun at himself makes the total lack of acknowledgement of Ariely’s other biggest public challenge of the 2020s – multiple allegations of data fabrication - all the more glaring. The most credible instance of this became public in 2021, 2 years before the publication of this book, when aData Colada blog post shared evidence of fraud in the data set of a notable 2012 study that Ariely and 4 other researchers had conducted into dishonesty.

The study claimed that dishonesty is lessened when people sign a statement of honest intent before providing information than if they sign the statement after providing information. After the study failed to replicate and was subsequently retracted, an examination by the anonymous Data Colada posters turned up several anomalies in some of the original data the study was based on. They include implausible distributions of data, lack of rounding in reported numbers, even differences in fonts used that seem to correspond with anomalous data.

There is ample reason to believe that this fabrication was performed by Ariely.An NPR story published a few months before the release of this book included astatement by the provider of the data that claimed the data set used in the study did not match what they had sent to Ariely.Ariely acknowledged the issues with the data and that he was the only member of the study who received the data, yet does not agree with claims that he fabricated data.

Ariely as an Unreliable Narrator Par Excellence in Whackjob World

Why read a book about research by someone whose research may not be credible? My answer is that I had enjoyed Ariely’s previous books and watching him speak live at a conference, but had been disillusioned by the fraud investigations and did not plan to read this book. I gave it a chance for 2 reasons - a colleague assured me that “he addresses that accusation thoroughly in the book” and the Kindle version went on sale for $1.99. The first reason turned out to be false. My colleague was talking about the 5G vaccine challenge, which I had heard nothing about, and she had no idea about the data fabrication challenge. 2 bucks is 2 bucks, though, so nevertheless I persisted in case there was something useful in it.

Some folks might find it odd to read a book by an author you don’t trust, but it’s not that big of a deal to me. Like many of you, I read a lot whackjobs both online and in print. It’s a necessary hazard of a life lived searching for compelling ideas to get an edge. As Whackjob Hall of Fame member Kanye West puts it, “If you want these crazy ideas and these crazy stages, this crazy music, and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.” Not all whackjobs have ideas worth paying attention to, but there are enough of them to make it fruitful. And since everyone is a bit of a whackjob in some way, if you try to ignore them all, you’ll eventually just end up talking to the biggest whackjob of all – yourself.

The secret to getting value from whackjobs is to treat them like an unreliable narrator. It’s a bit embarrassing how long I was doing this before I even knew that term existed, and what it meant. As described bythese beavers, an unreliable narrator is a term used in fiction for a first-person narrator in a story that focuses on their descriptions of other characters and the events of the plot. Think Huckleberry Finn or one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. Rather than omniscience about the universe of the story, we just get that person’s perspective. It’s on us as readers to understand both what they are experiencing and how their characteristics impact that experience. As long as the unreliable narrator is telling us something interesting, that’s good enough to keep reading.

Since I’ve gotten value from Ariely’s ideas in the past, I treated his book as I would any other interesting whackjob’s. I took on his point of view while reading the book and set aside the question of whether these ideas were true in favor of whether they could be useful. When I encountered a potentially useful idea, I subjected it to examination – looking for evidence, checking references, considering it against my own experiences, and contrasting it with other ideas. I kept what was useful and tossed the rest. Here are a couple of ideas new to me that I found useful:

The Villain Spiral (my name, since Ariely doesn’t really give this a name): If we attribute pain to a villain, we can easily make that villain the source of all that is wrong in the world. The need to attribute what happens in the world to a cause, the tendency for intended pain to hurt more, and the lack of habituation to intended pain is a toxic combination. We find relief when we can explain pain, but when that explanation involves a villain, that relief is short-lived and it is easy to blame them for other ills until it becomes an all-encompassing story. Thus, lizard people ruin everything. To counter this, we have to get more comfortable with ambiguity and work to extend grace to those we can’t stand (yes, even Donald Trump).

Solution Aversion: If the only perceived solution to a problem entails consequences that conflict with what we value, we’ll do anything we can to deny the problem. Climate change denial is appealing because using less energy is not. School shootings must be fake because restricting gun sales would be really awful. If we don’t like where the bus seems to be going, we won’t get on the bus no matter how bad it is where we are. Thus, if we want to solve problems, we have to create a wider range of solution options so that instead of arguing about problems, we can instead argue about solutions.

The most compellingly useful aspect of this book is that it is a good primer to help others avoid getting hijacked by whackjobs while still getting value from their useful observations. We were already accelerating into a Whackjob World of unreliable narrators, and that was before generative AI-fueled media started turbocharging this. Ariely intersperses “Hopefully Helpful” guidance throughout the book that can help those used to blindly trusting what they see online to shift to an unreliable narrator model. This guidance can be grouped into 2 main categories: how we relate to ourselves and the information we intake, and how we relate to others:

How we relate to ourselves and the information we intake:

Reattribute stress – connect your stressful feelings (and those of others) to specific events in your life rather than “shadowy forces and nefarious plots”
Learn to enjoy the state of ambiguity – like hot sauce or beer, we can cultivate the ability to hold multiple viewpoints at the same time, reducing the risk that we will fall for a single terrible idea
Don’t assume malice – Hanlon’s Razor, which Ariely modifies to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by human fallibility”, not only reduces the risk of a misunderstanding spiraling into destructive conflict, it also keeps us alert to things we can change to make something bad better
Be suspicious – The “suspicion glasses” Ariely mentioned at the start of this review is the most important tool a person has, and they are even more critical to use before we share information with others (which is a lesson I desperately wish many of my loved ones on social media would learn soon)
Challenge your beliefs – Ariely’s suggestions here frankly are a bit weak, so just plug Bayes in here as a way to ensure openness to changing your mind
Change the way you search – Use more neutral search terms when searching for explanations, or pair a search with the opposite framing to reduce the risk of confirmation bias
Scout mindset – Julia Galef’s notion (who Ariely explicitly name checks with good reason) of an explorative, investigative mindset to produce better maps rather than defending our viewpoint like a soldier
The three razors – Hanlon’s Razor, Occam’s Razor that “the simplest explanation is the one we should favor, until it is proven to be inadequate”, and Hitchen’s Razor that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” can fight the Villain Spiral and help alert us to explanations that are not useful and seek alternatives that are

How we relate to those around us:

Improve secure attachment – Form and maintain deep and trusting relationships (especially as a parent) to create resiliency that can make people less likely to fall prey to faulty explanations
Support a misbeliever – Don’t ostracize folks that have weird beliefs and reassure them that they don’t have to fall into the Villain Spiral or slip into an alternate universe just to find someone who seems to care about them
Have “nondebate” – focus on empathy first so people feel heard and reduce defense mechanisms that close them off to alternate viewpoints
Hesitate to negate – When you do need to counter a misbelief (in others or yourself), provide an alternate story early and focus on selling that story instead of trying to refute the misbelief
Start with better solutions – Addressing solution aversion as noted earlier
Paradoxical persuasion – Take an idea to its logical conclusion (5G is evil? Move toGreen Bank. Pharmais evil? Switch from a doctor to a shaman.)
Challenge the illusion of explanatory depth – Increase comfort with self-doubt by confronting ignorance of how ordinary things work (bicycles, zippers, toilets, etc) in yourself and others, as even doubting knowledge in a mundane area can prompt questioning of certainty in other areas
Risk assess your friends – Pay closer attention to friends that may be prone to misbeliefs and don’t wait to intervene with techniques like reattributing stress and other supportive behaviorsPractice intellectual humility – Express doubt and uncertainty regularly – “I’m not sure”, “As far as I know”, “Maybe I’m wrong” – and practice making good-faith arguments for positions you do not hold
Tend to your narcissists – For those folks in your life that are a bit more entitled and hubristic than average, help them find healthy ways to meet their needs
Start with common ground – Establish rapport with those you wish to persuade out of a misbelief by focusing on what you share instead of what you don’t
Don’t take extremity too literally – Extreme opinions are often driven by the need to establish identity and demonstrate loyalty to an in-group, so if someone you care about expresses an extreme opinion, recognize they are at a potential inflection point in their misbelief and do your best to help them turn back from subsuming themselves to their misbelief
Listen to former insiders – Our best way to reach those stuck in a misbelief is to listen and support those who have renounced those misbeliefs
Practice trust – Make yourself more vulnerable with others by picking up the tab and increasing how much personal info you share with them
Invite trust by demonstrating care – Show people in a tangible way that our interests are not purely self-serving

Hoisting Ariely on His Own Petard

Ariely’s guide to navigating Whackjob World is useful, but there is one aspect of the book where he seems to fall prey to his own misbelief. That comes when those misbeliefs impact trust in large institutions. For instance, Figure 1 in the book cites many examples of misbeliefs to show how they range across the political spectrum. Nestled in the discussions of COVID-19, aliens, and political shenanigans is a statement that is almost in the exact middle – “Banks manipulate the economy for financial gain.” Is Ariely seriously arguing that theSt. Louis Fed is fomenting misbelief when they report that financial sector profits make up 25-30% of all corporate profits despite making up less than 10% of GDP?

This bias becomes even more prominent at the end of the book when Ariely starts lamenting the loss of trust in society. Ariely states on page 273 that “Though the importance of trust in our modern society is somewhat hidden from sight, it does play a crucial role. And the funnel of misbelief leads to an erosion of trust between people, trust in governments, and trust in our important institutions.” (emphasis mine) Ariely further states on page 276 that “…once trust is eroded – once one starts doubting the FDA, for example – any action that contains the slightest ambiguity can be interpreted as further evidence of wrongdoing and further grounds for mistrust.” Ariely makes a strong case for why we must all aspire to be trustworthy.

It's remarkable and frankly disingenuous then that Ariely shares 2 examples of large institutions doing things that erode trust with minimal criticism of those behaviors.

Example 1: VAERS

Ariely examined a misbeliever’s claim that the FDA was removing submissions from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) without communicating it was doing so. The evidence for this was that a group of parents whose kids had been impacted by vaccines had created a more user-friendly website based on data downloads from VAERS. Examination of this site and the FDA’s revealed that some data had been removed from VAERS without acknowledgement.

Ariely found the misbeliever’s claim to be true when talking with an unnamed FDA IT person. That person attributed it to the FDA removing data it had determined was created by foreign powers attempting to spread disinformation. When questioned on why they would do so without communicating this, the reason given was to avoid tipping off those foreign powers that they were aware of this activity. Ariely then shared these findings with the misbeliever “…in the hope that his trust in VAERS would increase, maybe above the level of trust he had for the parents’ VAERS.” While it appears to be a surprise to Ariely, I doubt it is a surprise to you that this desired outcome did not occur.

Example 2: COVID-19 vaccine side effects

Ariely asked a doctor what she thought about the claims of unreported COVIID-19 vaccine side effects, she personally confirmed “…she had observed a lot of side effects in her clinic that had not been reported and had been collecting such data from her patients.” Ariely says nothing about why she was not reporting those side effects, but instead asks to see the data to no effect.

When Ariely asked an editor-in-chief of a large newspaper about this potential story, he was blunt. “The editor told me he suspected that I was correct about the underreported side effects. However, he had no intention of publishing anything about them.” This time, Ariely is explicit about his surprise to the editor, which yields an explanation that the information would be at high risk of being used unethically. Again, you are probably not as surprised as Ariely claimed to be.

To Ariely’s credit, he does devote a paragraph to address the cycle of mistrust between governments and people and says plainly “Because of the asymmetrical power differential, it’s incumbent upon the government to take the first steps.” But let’s not let him off the hook too easily for 1 paragraph in 320 pages. After all, one weird trick whackjobs use is to bury a statement of truth in an avalanche of lies and point to that when called out for being a liar. Given Ariely’s platform and that he has so many contacts in government and with the powerful, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that if he really believed this, he would have devoted a few pages or even a whole chapter to how institutional figures can start to rebuild trust.

Further evidence of Ariely’s reticence to bite the hand that feeds him comes from his lack of interest in examining why trust in large institutions has fallen off. While there is a screed about the “motivation-destroying scourge of bureaucracy” (perhaps aimed particularly at bureaucracy that makes it harder to hide data fabrication?), there is nothing about the origins of bureaucracy as a mechanism to increase trust – specifically the trust a ruler could have that their edicts would be executed faithfully. There is much bemoaning about disbelief in official government narratives, but it’s more interesting what is missing:

·The only mention of the war in Iraq is a hypothetical about 9/11 having been a staged attack by the US government. If this book had come out in 2003, “The US government knowingly used fake evidence to justify the Iraq invasion” would have been on Ariely’s list of misbeliefs. Nothing is said aboutclaims of weapons of mass destruction which were later determined to be misleading and the horrific costs borne as a result.

·The term “PRISM” makes no appearance in this book. That 2003 version of this book almost certainly would have included “There is a worldwide conspiracy to collect, store and analyze US citizen internet data” – which of course was denied for many years before it was revealed. Lack of discussion of this point when discussing loss of trust in government is malpractice.

Winning The Whackjob Game is a Volume Business

So Ariely clearly has a bias in favor of large institutions and would rather talk about how we should change rather than advise how they need to change. And while I’d stop short of calling him a fraud, it seems likely he has committed fraud. So does Dan Ariely actually believe all this stuff he is talking about, or is it all just a big show?

When dealing with an unreliable narrator, the frank answer is that this question is almost always useless. Adam Mastroianni summed it up perfectly when analyzing the impact of the allegations against Ariely and other researchers: “This whole debacle matters a lot socially: careers ruined, reputations in tatters, lawsuits flying. But strangely, it doesn't seem to matter much scientifically. That is, our understanding of psychology remains unchanged. If you think of psychology as a forest, we haven't felled a tree or even broken a branch. We've lost a few apples.”

Mastroianni further points out that when the replication crisis in psychology became evident, almost no one asked the question “Which studies didn’t replicate?” so they could update their worldview. His examination of why is excellent – seriously, go read the whole thing if you haven’t yet and then come back – but I’ll use a different analogy to explain this that is more helpful for navigating Whackjob World.

It’s no secret to this community that one of the strengths of the Internet is it is decentralized and thickly connected. We don’t subject a new node to rigorous vetting before it is allowed to connect; we just require it to follow a few rules and then let culture take its course. The useful stuff generally finds an audience, while the rest of it eventually becomes ossified like 99% of Geocities content from the 90s.

Mirroring this approach is the best way we have found so far to navigate Whackjob World. While there is appeal in reading the 100 greatest books over and over, it’s unlikely any of those books will tell us how to get our mouse wheel to stop scrolling erratically. But areddit poster’s Black Magic can. Sure, spend some time with the great works, but most of our time is best devoted to taking in a volume of perspectives, engaging with them sincerely but skeptically, and updating our worldview accordingly. That way, even if a lot of what we consume turns out to be wrong, lies, or both, it’s just not that big of a deal.

This intake, though, must be balanced with our own work to develop our skills and our ability to communicate with others so we don’t trap ourselves in a bubble. Yes, we will make mistakes and we will be wrong at times, and perhaps we’ll even be a bit fraudulent when it suits our needs. We are human, after all. But just because we will on occasion be someone else’s whackjob does not excuse us from trying not to be. As we develop expertise in navigating Whackjob World and whatever historians will call this period we are in, we will be better positioned to cope with the bad and take advantage of the good.

Ariely himself seems to be following this model, and why shouldn’t he? His career is testament to the notion that if we develop our skills and networks, we can be successful. Hell, we can even overcome damning evidence of fraud, apparently. TheDuke Chronicle reports that after a highly secretive review by Duke, Ariely told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the investigation had concluded that he had not falsified data or knowingly falsified data. A Duke spokesperson reportedly told the CHE that “we are not in a position to confirm or fact-check anything on this”. An anonymous Duke community memberasked its academic council the question many of us asked ourselves when we heard the news:

“Could you please explain why Duke is “not in a position” to reassure the Duke community—and indeed the world—that Duke takes academic fraud seriously?

The answer? Not an impressive one, so I won’t even bother to quote it. Go read it if you want, but it’s exactly the kind of bureaucracy that Ariely railed against. That said, I suspect in this case he didn’t mind it that much. After all, he’s spent his career navigating these waters and knows how the game is played. Thus, Ariely himself provides a model for how to navigate Whackjob World. It’s not a model I am enamored with, but since I’m a whackjob too, you can draw your own conclusions on what to take from all of this.

One thing is clear, though: Duke’s exoneration justifies Ariely’s misbelief in the essential goodness of large institutions, given his ability to navigate their politics. Whether the rest of us should share in this misbelief or any other must ultimately be left as an exercise to the reader.