1609: The Truth Experts part 2

Speaker: Get ready, because this is one hell of a meta episode. Everything we know about what drives people to be honest may be a lie. Just follow me here for a second. First, let's hear what the leading experts in the field of honesty have to say about lying. We all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel that we're good people. At the same time, we want to benefit from cheating. And maybe what we're doing is we're balancing these two goals. We cheat up to the level we would have to update our image of ourselves. So we cheat up to the level that we can still look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about it. Interesting idea, but these aren't just opinions. Dan Ariely, who you just heard in the last clip, says that he tested this idea hundreds if not thousands of times. And he says that with just a few changes, We can encourage people to be more truthful. We all tell lies, it's a human thing, but do you believe that we can tweak behaviors to trick people into doing the right thing? Let's see what the research says. After all, facts don't lie, numbers don't lie, and academic researchers shouldn't lie either, right? But what happens when these so called truth experts, you know, the Ivy League researchers are literally writing the book on dishonesty? Are accused of lying and manipulating data. Who fact checks the truth tellers in an age of misinformation, who can we trust? I'd like to say that we should be able to trust the media. There's an old saying that journalists should put their finger in the stink and tell you the odor. We're not supposed to craft a narrative to shape public opinion, but we all know that trust in the media is at an all time low. So if we don't trust the media to tell us the truth, then who else can we trust? Academia, right? These researchers are strictly looking at the numbers. Science is our last hope for objectivity. But some people behind the studies that we're going to be talking about in this episodes are just people and people make mistakes. But what happens when it's not a mistake and data is fabricated to present the illusion of truth? The results could be disastrous. That means we really can't trust anything we hear or read. But I don't want to live in that world. It is up to us, you and me, to hold people accountable so that the institutions that we trust remain trustworthy. After all, we can't let a few rotten eggs spoil the entire world around us. Today's story recaps a scandal in the behavioral science field, a big one, one that's been covered by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NPR, and even podcasts like Freakonomics and Planet Money. Each one of these news outlets shined the spotlight to a different part of the story, so you will hear me reference a lot of their work in these episodes, but all of them were missing one voice. And that is the man at the center of this controversy, Dan Ariely. Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. In this rare interview, I confronted Dan Ariely about the studies in question, and to my surprise, he answered all of my questions. I'm Javier Leyva, and this is Pretend. Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University, studies dishonesty. You may not know his name, but trust me, this guy is a rock star in the academic world. His work on dishonesty provides profound insights into human nature and has influenced government worldwide. Let's just put it this way, if we judge success by his public speaking rate, this guy is a top billing act. The Bruce Springsteen of academia. It's estimated that Ariely charges anywhere in the range of 50, 000 to 100, 000 a speech. NBC even developed a TV series inspired by his work. Dan Ariely has also authored several best selling books such as Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. Everything about Dan Ariely is a paradox. This is a man deeply entrenched in the exploration of truth, yet his career is shadowed by accusations of data fabrication. But then there's his appearance. Let me explain. If you see Dan Ariely walking down the street, you wouldn't miss him at all because of his distinct half beard. The beard, meticulously groomed on one side of his face, fades into a smooth skin on the other. A visual reminder of the severe burns he suffered in an accident when he was young. These scars Add a layer of depth to his character. Some might say that Dan Ariely has a menacing appearance, but that goes away quickly after he disarms you with his charm and warmth. You can't help but getting drawn in by his wit and intellect. It's no wonder why he's such a beloved and respected voice in the field. But these days, his star is fading. Ariely says that he conducted hundreds if not thousands of experiments throughout his career. But there's one research study that stands above the rest. We'll refer to the study as the Honesty Pledge Experiment. Have you ever signed the form at the very bottom? It asks you to click here or sign your name declaring that the information you provided on the form is true. Well, Dan Ariely at Duke and a few other researchers from Harvard Northwestern University, the University of Toronto, wondered what would happen if that question, or the Honesty Pledge, were at the top rather than the bottom of the form. Here's Dan Ariely explaining this experiment. at a Talks at Google event. We went to the IRS, and we said, look, we found out that if people sign at the top, they're less likely to cheat. Now, when people get to the bottom of the tax form, it's kind of too late. They've cheated. Why don't we try out with getting people to sign at the top? And they basically told us they have bigger fish to fry than this particular one. It makes sense to me. I can totally see how signing an honesty pledge at the top would get in people's heads. The study, based on multiple experiments, was published on PNAS, one of the world's most cited and comprehensive scientific journals. The researchers concluded that signing before, rather than after the opportunity to cheat, significantly reduces dishonesty. One experiment used math puzzles where participants identified a pair of numbers, added them up, earning money for each correct pair. Those who signed the Honesty Pledge at the top were found to be more truthful. Another experiment, the one that Dan Ariely was in charge of, asked car insurance policyholders to jot down their car's mileage. So many insurance companies, uh, send people forms in the middle of the year, asking how many miles did you drive? The idea is that these drivers have a clear incentive to lie. The less mileage they report, the less car insurance they have to pay. So some people signed at the top, filled in their miles, some people filled in their miles and signed at the bottom. Turns out the people who signed at the top drove much more. And then the people who signed, signed at the bottom. Really? Is it that simple? Just guilt trip people at the beginning and they'll choose to do the right thing? Think about it. Just signing something a second before you fill the number, not you, other people, dramatically changes the level of cheating. So Ariely conducts this car insurance experiment, and even before he publishes the results, he's telling people that the Honesty Pledge works. So now, let's get back to that famous academic paper published in 2012. You know, the one he partnered with Harvard and various prestigious universities? In the published scientific journal, Ariely and his co authors claimed that signing the honesty pledge at the beginning of the questionnaire reduces cheating by, get this, 10%. As you can expect, the paper made huge waves. The New Yorker said that even the Obama administration included the paper's finding in the annual White House report. And government bodies in the UK, Canada, Guatemala, they all used this study. The governments must have thought, well, if this form at the top really works, perhaps they could recoup billions of tax dollars a year. Let's talk about Guatemala for a second. According to the IRS, Guatemala is a low middle income country with one of the lowest tax revenues in the world. So, it made perfect sense that they would jump at the opportunity to try the Honesty Pledge. Michael Sanders, a scientist who leads the Behavioral Insights team for the UK government, was working with the Guatemalan tax officials to try to improve the system. We're running this study and we're going to launch it and we're going to run it for three months with three million. Tax returns and we'll call you back in four, in four months with the results. This is a clip from NPR's Planet Money podcast. Did the intervention work? It worked not at all. So we were Not at all? Not at all. There are a few things in my life that I am in a statistical sense more confident of than that this didn't work. That's strange because it totally seems plausible. And not only that, but behavior scientists from Duke, Harvard, and other universities, they all said it works. So what's going on here? In 2021, Data Sleuths, who run a blog called Data Collada, started sniffing around the data presented by Dan Ariely and his co authors. The Data Collada blog was tipped off by an anonymous source. The tipster said, you might want to take a closer look at that car insurance study. There was something fishy going on with the data. First of all, when most people report their car mileage, it's expected that they would round off. My car had 50, 000 miles on it. It's hard to imagine that people will give an exact number, for example, 52, 340 miles. But not these numbers in the data sets. They were very specific. Then the tipster told the Data Colada blog something else. Take a look at the fonts. If you look closely, one of the fonts is clean and modern looking, and the other one is a sans serif font with the little decorative tails at the end of the letters. Well, it turns out that the tipster was right. Half of the data was in the font Calibri, and the other half was in Cambria font. Very odd, right? The data colada guys started digging. There was something seriously wrong with the data. First of all, if you collect data from a random sample of car mileage from an insurance company, what you should find is that some people drive a lot, other people drive very little miles, and then there are those people who drive about 14, 000 miles a year, which is the average. But the data from this Excel spreadsheet, if you plot it on a graph, should look like a bell curve. But that's not what the Data Colada guys found. The data on the Excel spreadsheet produced a flat line. Here's Uri Simonson with the Data Colada blog, talking with the Planet Money podcast. It just had an impossible shape. Like, there were just as many people who drove a thousand miles as there were who drove two thousand miles, as there were who drove ten thousand miles, as there were forty thousand miles, all the way to fifty thousand miles. And that's just crazy. But what's even crazier is that according to this data, no one drove more than fifty thousand miles. Yuri Simonson with Data Collada has an explanation for this. He says that it's a simple Excel spreadsheet formula that can generate random numbers. So give me a random number in between 0 if you do that, you get exactly this spreadsheet. The point is, the data was faked. But who could have done it? Was Dan Ariely cooking the books? Was this sloppy work and he just made an honest mistake? It's really hard to tell. Dan Ariely says that he was the only one communicating with the car insurance company. However, he denies he had any wrongdoing. He told reporters that his defense is that someone at the insurance company must have fudged the numbers. But think about it. Why would the car insurance company forge the data? And why would they forge the data in a way to satisfy the study's hypothesis? Without the original data from the car insurance company, there's no way to compare it. Therefore, there's no way to find the person responsible. So the Data Colada guys kept looking at the experiment published in the Honesty Pledge paper. They noticed something else fishy with one of the other experiments in the study. Not Dan Ariely's, by the way. This time, they say they found another scientist with her hand in the data jar. That is after the break. After the Data Colada blog published their findings on the car insurance study, the authors of the paper retracted the study. But there was a problem with another experiment in the Honesty Pledge paper. Yes, let the irony soak in. Two famous behavioral economists are accused of faking data on a paper about making people more honest. The Honesty Pledge featured three different experiments. One of them is the Dan Ariely car insurance study that we've been talking about. The other was conducted by Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, the Data Colada guys were contacted by Zoe Ziani, one of Francesco Gino's past PhD students. Ziani began suspecting Gino of p hacking her studies. P hacking, by the way, is manipulating data or cherry picking the data in the research to achieve whatever result you wanted to. When Ziani had spoken up about the suspicions in the past, academics looked down upon her and implied that she should stay quiet. After replicating one of Geno's studies in 2021 and finding the results just didn't check out, Ziani and an anonymous collaborator blew the whistle to the Data Colada crew. Just like the car insurance study, Francesca Gino's study involved signing an honesty pledge at the top of the form. But this time, the participants had to work out 20 math puzzles, answer correctly, and they collect a dollar for each puzzle. All they had to do was report how many puzzles they solved correctly, and they would get the cash. No proof necessary. So clearly, there is an incentive to lie. Half of the participants had to sign at the bottom. The other half had to sign at the top. Francesca Gino's experiment showed that people were overwhelmingly more honest when they had to sign at the top. Easy, right? The Data Colada guys looked at the data, and again, some things just weren't adding up. It appeared as if the data was being moved by hand to create a more desirable result. That's not cherry picking the data, that's actually making the data up. But how could they prove it? Well, Excel has a little known feature that keeps track of all the changes. It's called a calc chain file. Almost like a breadcrumb trail or a history. And aha! There was no doubt this time. The data was moved around. And it appears that there was only one person who handled that data. And that was Professor Francesca Gino. But, despite the overwhelming evidence against Gino, it's still circumstantial evidence at the end of the day. When asked about the digital trail in the Excel spreadsheet, Gino told the New York Times, quote, What I've learned is that it's super risky to jump to conclusions without the complete evidence, unquote. There's no way to prove that it was Gino typing in the fake data herself. But it sure looks like it. Gino conducted the study while she was at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina. But at the time of the fraud allegations, she was a top professor at the Harvard Business School. To understand the stakes here, you have to know that Francesca Gino was kind of a big deal. Like Dan Ariely, Gino was another superstar in the behavioral science world. One of her papers has been cited more than 500 times in other people's research. In 2020, she was actually the 5th highest paid employee at Harvard, earning almost, get this, a million dollars a year. And, she made almost as much money as Harvard's president. So that's two different experiments in the same paper about honesty proven to be lies. But what's interesting is that the fallout for Professor Francesca Gino was radically different than that of Professor Dan Ariely. After the story broke, Harvard conducted its own research and found evidence of data manipulation in not one but four of Gino's academic papers. Harvard retracted the papers and they put Gino on administrative leave. Gino maintains her innocence. In fact, she's suing Data Colada and Harvard. In August of last year, she filed a 25 million lawsuit saying that she was defamed by the blog and Harvard wrongfully terminated her. Since being sued, Data Colada's supporters have raised almost 400, 000 in a GoFundMe account. In fact, they reached their goal of 250, 000 in less than two days. For the record, I reached out to David Collada's authors for an interview, and they never responded. I also reached out to Francesca Gino for comments. Her attorney responded, and I quote, Thank you for the interest, but unfortunately, Professor Gino is not providing interviews at the moment. Unquote. So, Professor Gino suffered a devastating blow to her academic career. It's hard to imagine how she recovers from this. But unlike Francesca Gino, Dan Ariely is still out there doing his thing. Ariely is still employed by Duke University, and he has since even published another book. He's given a few interviews on the topic, but only in print. But I managed to get Dan Ariely to talk on the record. That is after the break. I reached out to Dan Ariely because I wanted to interview him about his latest book titled Misbelief. Misbelief is all about the spread of misinformation, which is a topic that I'm personally interested in. So that's true, I did want to interview Ariely about his new book, but I also wanted to ask him about the elephant in the room. The car insurance study. But of course, I'm not going to lead with that. Hey, so I don't know how much time you have, but I just want to jump in there. I read your book. I actually read two of your books recently, and so I'm very excited to talk with you. There's so many questions that I have. Very good. We started off with a softball question. And my first question is, why are like people actively seeking and then spreading misinformation? Okay. So, so the, the, the story is actually quite complex about misinformation. And it is very complex, but not in the ways I expected. You see, everything I've talked to you so far in this episode was just exposition to get to this point. Let me explain. When I first read his latest book, Misbelief, I thought that I was going to get a book about fake news and the psychology behind conspiracy theories and how dangerous a lie can be once it spreads. And sure, it had some of that in there. But I was surprised to find out that Dan Ariely's book on misinformation wasn't about its effect on you and me. It was mostly about misinformation on Dan Ariely and his role with the COVID vaccine rollout. I didn't see that coming. Throughout the book, Ariely describes an internet backlash because of his work with the governments. These online attackers were associating Ariely with the Illuminati, and they even compared him to Hitler. But in reality, Ariely says that he was working on ways to incentivize people wearing masks. He even came up with new ways to decrease domestic violence by encouraging children to report incidents of abuse at home. The strange thing about all this is that there really is an internet backlash against Ariely, except it doesn't appear to be about COVID 19. In reality, if you search his name, the only controversy that pops up is about the car insurance study, but instead he focused his effort on a completely unexpected controversy. One that I had trouble corroborating. Let's hear him out. Think back about early COVID days, and I feel I'm the most useful I've ever been. There's also all kinds of social science issues. What do we do with distant education and distant work? And what do we do with the increase in domestic violence and wearing masks? things and I try to be as helpful as possible. And then sometime in July, I get an email from somebody that says, Dan, what happened, how have you become that person? I write quickly back, said, what happened? And I get a long list of emails of links that show how evil I am. There's a link that shows how I joined the cabal to try and kill as many healthy people as possible. I got. Death threats almost every day. It's been grueling. And why you? Why do you think they targeted you? I think part of it is my half a beard, right? And you know that the reason is that I was badly burned. So this side is just burns. I don't have hair on this side, but. It does look strange. Tell me about the accident while we're talking about it, and then we'll jump back. I was burned from a military flare that exploded. So it's a lot of magnesium, very hot, burning very hot. And I got, I was next to it by accident. And I, 70 percent of my body was burned. I was in hospital for about three years. Very tough injury. We'll get back to the COVID misinformation in a second. Let's take a detour to talk about his burn accident. for your time. I'm not suggesting that Dan Ariely wasn't involved in a terrible accident. I'm talking to him over video chat and it is clear that he suffered severe burns on more than half of his body. Even his hands and his fingers are stiff because of the burns. What I'm trying to reconcile is the fact that even his account of the accident is not always consistent. Welcome to Book Tour. I am Neta Uliby. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely was an 18 year old in the Israeli army when a magnesium flare he was standing near suddenly exploded. Third degree burns covered his body. That's a clip from a 2008 NPR interview describing Ariely's military accident. If you google Tan Ariely's name with the word magnesium and military in quotes, you will find several news articles stating that he was injured in the Israeli army. A local paper in Raleigh described him as a quote, an 18 year old Israeli fulfilling his country's military requirements. When a cache of magnesium flares exploded. NPR also claimed that he was an 18 year old soldier in the Israeli army. Even the New York Times said he was an 18 year old military trainee. But there's zero record of Ariely serving in the Israeli military. In all fairness, I couldn't find any direct quote of him claiming that the accident happened when he was 18 and in the military. But how did all these high profile reports get that idea? Well, in his 2008 book, Predictably Irrational, he does say that he was 18 when the accident happened, not 17. Now he says he was 17 and a half. But he was just rounding up. It happened while you were in the Israeli military? No, I wasn't in the military. I was in 12th grade, but I was in a place that was next to some military supplies. I was in the youth movement that had people in the youth movement that had some supplies in their apartment. So what really happened? According to the New Yorker, Documents from a court ruling in Israel confirmed that the accident occurred in an apartment where kids were mixing chemicals for a nighttime fire ceremony. The strange thing is that I too have suffered third degree burns. And if someone were to have asked me 20 years ago what happened, I would tell them that I got burned when I was 8 months old, I pulled the rice cooker. If you ask me 20 years from now, I will tell you the same story. For me, the story has never changed. But when it comes to Arielli, sometimes the details get muddied up. But let's get back to his latest book, Misbelief. In the book, Arielli grapples with why seemingly rational people believe irrational things. Anyone who's had Thanksgiving dinner with their family has wondered, why do people believe conspiracies? There are right wing conspiracies. There are left wing conspiracies, even some non political ones too. Everyone's a little crazy. Is Taylor Swift the by product of the deep state? Are Satan worshipping pedophiles eating babies from the basement of a DC pizza parlor? Do drug companies have a cure for cancer but are holding back in order to make a profit? You know those condensation trails left by airplanes? Some people believe that they are government chemtrails raining down on us to control the population. And my personal favorite, which I kinda sorta believe myself, Paul McCartney died and was replaced by a lookalike. Admit it, we can all be a little conspiracy minded sometimes. And the first lesson for me was that these people should not be discounted, and their misbeliefs should not be discounted. And what I mean by that is that, you know, it's very easy to say, oh, it's those people. No, it's not those people. It's all of us in potential. And what I came to realize is that those misbeliefs are answering a real need. These are real needs that people have. They have, um, we'll come back to exactly what it is, but they have a real psychological need. And those, these misbeliefs answer that need, and we should understand them as such. Yes, there are misbeliefs, they're inaccurate, they're not very healthy, and so on. But they don't come from nothing. Nobody wakes up and says, today I want to become a misbeliever. They have some psychological, deep psychological need. And that's the answer that they find. Not the ideal answer, but that's the answer that they find. So that's what I thought Ariely's book Misbelief was all about. But right off the top on the very first page, like the old foot in the door technique, he flips the script. And instead of talking about society in general, he focuses on how misinformation was aimed at him. But people have connected the dots. Oh, Dan said this about that. And he, uh, did work with the Gates Foundation and he worked on a vaccine and he said something about ambulances. So I think it's the odd look. It's the fact that I, uh, produced a lot of material and I helped lots of governments in early COVID. And once I became a target, It's a self reinforcing process. So I've learned a lot in this process, but one of the things that was the toughest was to realize that people would keep on hating me. That some people in the world, like no matter, I think I'm a kind, generous, helpful person, but that there are some people who would hate me forever in a deep way, and that there's nothing I can do about it. But here's the thing. Transcribed I've searched the internet high and low, and I can't find any of these hateful comments aimed at Ariely. I mean, as you can imagine, I'm kind of good at finding things online. If what Dan Ariely is saying is true, These conspiracy theories about him should be relatively easy to find. At first, I did a simple Google search. I typed in Dan Ariely in quotes. Then I typed COVID in quotes. All I found was interviews with Dan Ariely talking about his new book. So I backdated my search. So I typed in the same search, but But this time I was looking for everything posted prior to the book's release on September 19th, 2023. All I found were some articles about Ariely's work on using social science to navigate through COVID and shutdown. But maybe I need to dig a little deeper. This time I took the same search, I added it to specific sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and nothing. At least nothing controversial. I even switched my VPN to Israel to see if maybe some of the comments were coming from that side of the world. Nothing really jumped out at me. So I asked Dan Ariely about this. Where did these links, where were all these posts? Was it on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook? What was it? In the beginning, they were more on standard social media, a lot on, on, on Facebook, uh, then, uh, many more, uh, moves to telegram. And then there were all these other. media. Rumble is one. I forget all, I don't, I don't spend as much time on those, uh, anymore. I had all kinds of. Things, but they were just all over, all over the place. Going back to some of these articles and posts and things that you were seeing during the COVID, where can I find some of these? Because I was looking, I looked really hard for like 30 to 40 minutes and on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, I could not find any of these. Can you forward me? I checked rumble and nothing, but what's interesting about this whole thing is that if you search Arielly's name. But remove the word COVID from the search, he does get a lot of criticism online. One tweet reads, quote, Dan Ariely is a fraud. Another, Dan Ariely faked his data. Another, why doesn't Duke discipline Ariely? There's no shortage of controversy. But all of this hate is not about his role during the pandemic. All of this stems from the fraud allegations of the car insurance policy study. It almost makes me wonder if the book Misbelief is really just a proxy for the backlash that he's been getting from the Honesty Pledge paper. Here you have a celebrity behavior economist who was on top of the world but now is limping along because of the black eye he received from publishing falsified data. Is this supposed COVID controversy a proxy issue used to divert our attention from the real issue at hand? Maybe instead of misbelief, the book should have been called misdirection. Did Ariely create a non issue to focus our attention away from the bigger, underlying problem? Remember, Dan Ariely is the authority when it comes to almost everything we know about dishonesty. He's written many books about this. So I asked him about it. You did an experiment that kind of brings all this together, which is Your conclusion was that getting caught doesn't substantially influence the amount of cheating in all those examples you pointed. And I think you said in your book, we cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self image as reasonably honest individuals. Can you talk about that idea? Yeah. And for this experiment, I set up the vending machine and I said, 75 cents per candy. And, and there were six candies and people would put the money and press the button and get. Change and get the candy. But for this experiment, I set it up in the machine that the cost was zero. So what does it mean? The machine gave all the change back. You would put a dollar, you would press, the machine will calculate, a dollar minus zero is a dollar, here's everything back. So people would get all the money back. And I had a sign that says, If something is wrong in the machine, call this number. And it was my cell phone number, so I knew when people called. Question number one is, what percentage of people called? The answer is zero. The second question was, how many candies did people take? And the majority took three or four, and nobody took five. And this is exactly the idea, is that people could justify taking a few candies, but five would feel like stealing, right? So you could take the whole machine, but if you started putting a dollar and putting everything in your backpack, you could not help but feel like a thief. But if you put, took a few of them, three or four, you could easily justify to us. And this is the kind of explanation that people give to themselves. Like we, we act immorally up to a level that we could settle it with. I'm a good person. I'm just restoring my vending karma. Stealing five would be too much. So if you think back to your, the con men, you know, think about what is it in their hierarchy of values. The people I know, um, basically give different names to the suckers that they work, right? There's all kinds of terminology for that. They're trying to make them feel less human. They basically are playing with this value. They don't think of themselves. It's being dishonest. They've just adopted a different Way of thinking about it, by the way, I'm going to post my unedited conversation with Dan Ariely for you to listen to. It's actually a fascinating conversation and a lot of it didn't make it into this episode. But when you listen to it, you'll see that he hardly let me get a word in. He was on a roll, but by this point we were 50 minutes into our conversation. And I still hadn't asked him about the car insurance study, so I abruptly cut him off. So, I want to ask you something you said earlier, is that your job as a social scientist, as a behavioral scientist, is to shorten that gap, you know, make people a little bit more honest. And you've done some work in, you know, the nudge factor, reminding people not to cheat, maybe make some more ethical. And I would be remiss to not talk about the Honesty Pledge and that experiment. So I know that there's been a lot of controversy regarding that experiment. Can you denounce, on the record, you know, that the study was, that the data was manipulated, like very specifically? So, first of all, there's this notion about honesty pledges. And honesty pledges is basically saying, We have this ability to justify ourselves, but when we think about it at the moment, if we decide to be honest, we can be honest. It doesn't last forever, but it lasts for a while. So think about in court, we swear the Bible before we testify, not after. Like every legal document, you sign it at the end. Why, why do we swear before? Where is it coming from? It's coming from because we understand that, like, the way real interaction, like, Signing at the bottom is what lawyers do, but signing in the beginning is what you would do psychologically. Ariely tried to justify the validity of the study, but then he faced the question head on. Now, all that being said, there was a study that we published in 2012. that was based on falsified data. Science, like everything else, is a process that lots of people get involved and there's opportunity for mistake and so on. And it's very sad. I've done over a thousand experiments in my career. I'm probably have done more than one mistake, but this is a big mistake. And it was, I was a co author. uh, on the paper that had, uh, you know, was based on falsified data. And, and can you just say for the record, like, who's falsified that data? I don't know. Because it happened in 2007 and 2008. As you can imagine, this is not a simple matter. It's very complex. So I looked at it very carefully for a long time. I can't tell you, I can't tell you. I have some suspicions. Can you tell me that it was the insurance company or was it on the universities? I have, I have, I have lots of suspicions. I have no evidence. I can tell you for sure. I didn't do it. But I can't tell for sure. And you know, I've had years of being accused on things I didn't do. I am in no, I've become very sensitive to accusing anybody. Without having a absolute. So I don't know who did it. There's a few possibilities. It's very sad. I think people, at the end of the day, know that people make mistakes and they just want accountability or ownership. Like even if I'm a, a, like a manager at a company and one of my employees steals something or whatever, it was my team. It was my. It might not have been me that stole the paper, the Rima paper, but it was my team and that ownership and accountability. I think that maybe that's what people are looking for. I'm certainly feel that it happened under my supervision and everything I've done is to take responsibility for this. But Um, yep, we need to move on. It could be that we hit the top of the hour and he had other appointments or that this conversation made him feel a little uncomfortable. When we ended our call, I thought that was the last time I would ever hear from Dan Ariely. So I emailed him my remaining questions and he replied, if you intend to add these false accusations to the podcast, maybe it is best to have another session and get my answers on the record. But I will also ask you to promise me not to edit these. And to give my answers exactly as I present them. If you're up to this, let's schedule something. And so I agreed. Next time on Pretend, Dan Ariely and I dive in. And as promised, I will air the entire interview. I will interrupt here and there to add context, but other than that, you will listen to the entire second interview. I will also post the original interviews on my site. I'll have a link to that in the show notes. Both Part 1 and Part 2 are available right now on PretendPlus and Patreon. Today's episode was written by me, Javier Leyva, and Audrey Gibbs. It was edited by the talented Puneet Shanoi with the podcast pundits. And as always, let me know what you think of the episode. Shoot me an email at Javier at PretendRadio. org or find me on social at PretendPod. I'm on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, you name it. Shoot me a direct message, post something. I'd love to hear from you guys. All right, take care. We'll talk soon.