Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely (דן אריאלי; born April 29, 1967) is an Israeli-American professor and author.

He serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.

Ariely is the co-founder of several companies implementing insights from behavioral science.

However, in his last year he dropped philosophy and concentrated solely on psychology, graduating in 1991.

In 1994 he earned a masters in cognitive psychology, and in 1996 he earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ariely was previously married to Sumedha (Sumi) Gupta in 1998.

They have two children.

Ariely was a physics and mathematics major at Tel Aviv University but transferred to philosophy and psychology.

Ariely completed a second Ph.D. in Business Administration at Duke University in 1998, at the urging of Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Ariely taught at MIT between 1998 and 2008, where he was formerly the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management and at the MIT Media Lab.

In 2006, when Ariely was a professor at the MIT Media Lab, he conducted experiments including electric shocks without the fully finalized procedure of ethics approval.

MIT's Institutional Review Board (IRB) originally granted a human experiment, but afterwards there was a change in the protocol for which a fresh approval was only granted after the experiments had been conducted.

MIT's ethics committee banned Ariely from conducting experiments for a year.

The university found that Ariely's assistant in running the study had no human-subjects training.

Ariely confirmed that he was suspended from research at MIT and said that he thought the experiments had been approved, and that he did not remember receiving a letter asking additional questions.

In August 2021, data from a field study in a 2012 PNAS paper by Lisa L. Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Dan Ariely, and Max H. Bazerman was reanalyzed on the blog Data Colada.

The blog post claimed that the study data was fabricated.

In 2008, Ariely returned to Duke University as James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics.

Ariely's laboratory at Duke University, the Center for Advanced Hindsight, pursues research in subjects like the psychology of money, decision making by physicians and patients, cheating, and social justice.

In 2008, Ariely, along with his co-authors, Rebecca Waber, Ziv Carmon and Baba Shiv, was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in medicine for their research demonstrating that "high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine."

Ariely has co-founded a number of companies.

In 2010, Ariely co-founded BEworks, a management consulting firm dedicated to applying behavioral science to business and policy challenges.

Ariely wrote an advice column called Ask Ariely in the WSJ from June 2012 until September 2022.

In 2012, he co-founded Timeful with Yoav Shoham and Jacob Bank, developing a time management app.

All of the 2012 study's authors agreed with this assessment and the paper was retracted.

He also co-founded the companies Genie (a kitchen appliance for cooking healthy food, 2013), Irrational Labs (consulting, 2013), Shapa (health monitoring, 2017), Kayma (behavioral research for the Israeli Ministry of Finance, 2018), and Irrational Capital (quantifying corporate culture for investors, 2018).

Ariely is the author of the three New York Times best selling books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. He co-produced the 2015 documentary (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies.

Since 2021, Ariely has faced multiple accusations of data fraud and academic misconduct, which have resulted in a retracted paper.

In 2024, Duke completed a 3-year confidential investigation and according to Ariely concluded that "data from the honesty-pledge paper had been falsified but found no evidence that Ariely used fake data knowingly".

Dan Ariely was born to Yoram and Dafna Ariely in New York City while his father was studying for an MBA degree at Columbia University.

He has two sisters.

The family immigrated to Israel when he was three years old.

He grew up in Ramat Hasharon and attended Makif Hasharon High School.

In his senior year of high school, Ariely was active in Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed, an Israeli youth movement.

While he was preparing a (fire inscription) for a traditional nighttime ceremony, the flammable materials he was mixing exploded, causing third-degree burns to over 70 percent of his body.

In his writings entitled "Painful Lessons," Ariely described his hospitalization and treatments, detailing how that experience led to his research on "how to better deliver painful and unavoidable treatments to patients."

Timeful was acquired by Google in 2015.

In 2015, Ariely invested in and was named chief behavioral economist for Qapital, which develops a personal finance app and collaborates with Ariely on research on consumer saving and spending behavior.

In 2016, Ariely was named Chief Behavioral Officer for Lemonade, an insurance company, to integrate aspects of behavioral economics into Lemonade's insurance model.

BEworks was acquired by kyu Collective in January 2017.