Dan Ariely

He was born in New York and moved to Israel as a young child. His mother was a parole officer for juvenile delinquents; he recalled that when he was four she hired as his nanny a young woman who was facing jail, and that the woman later named her first child after him.⁠[1]

In 2011 he described his childhood as “very flexible, not very rule-oriented, and also with a lot of autonomy.” He recalled that at seven, after receiving a B in second grade, he put it to his mother that he could either work for an A or skip homework and still earn a B, and that she accepted his reasoning. He also said that as a youngster he was a poor student who often daydreamed at the back of the class.⁠[1]

He has written that in 1984 he was 17, a high-school student in Israel and a member of a youth movement devoted to study, civic work and preparation for military service; one Friday afternoon, while materials from a graduation ceremony that featured large fires were being put away, a large magnesium flare exploded next to him and he was engulfed in flames. “Nobody knows exactly what happened,” he wrote. About 70 percent of his body was covered in third-degree burns.⁠[2][1]

Accounts of his age at the time differ: a 2011 campus profile gives 18, while in 2024 he said he was 17 and a half. In 2008 several news outlets stated that he had been injured in the Israeli army; he denies this, saying that he was never a soldier or a military trainee and that he was a member of a youth-service organization.⁠[1][3]

He has written that he was taken first to the emergency department of Beilinson Hospital and then to Tel Hashomer Hospital, both near Tel Aviv, and spent about three years in hospital care, surgery and bandages, with daily soaking baths during which the bandages were removed and pressure bandages that covered him from head to toe. About four months after the injury he first saw himself in a full-length mirror: his eyes were pulled sharply to one side, and his right ear, nose and mouth were charred and distorted. In his Hebrew-language self-introduction he writes that he was burned over most of his body, including half of his face.⁠[2][1][4]

On his website he writes that treatments in the burn department, especially the daily “bath,” exposed him to persistent irrational behavior, and that after leaving the hospital he set out to learn how painful but unavoidable treatments could be delivered better; only later did he see that research on decision-making also applies to finances, health, habits and personal life.⁠[5][6]

In 2015 he wrote that he has lived with pain to varying degrees every day of his adult years and that his scars still make him feel out of place in most social settings, although he is more comfortable in public now; he also wrote that he does not think the injury was worth it. The “About” page of his website includes a photograph of his most recent surgery, a few years earlier, a “plastic Z” scar procedure, which he describes as probably the least complex and least painful of his surgeries.⁠[2][5]

After leaving the hospital he studied part-time at Tel Aviv University; he recalled that a course in brain physiology prompted him to test conventional wisdom scientifically, and that he went back to the burn ward to test the debate over how bandages should be removed and found that he was right. He also said that his pressure bandages limited his social life in college—he could not eat in the cafeteria, sit on the grass or write—so he listened closely in class and came to enjoy it.⁠[1]

He has written that his harrowing years had left him deeply interested in how people experience pain and in the experimental method, and that he chose to study psychology at the university. He received a B.A. in psychology from the university in June 1991.⁠[2][7]

He returned to the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry for graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel HillUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) is a public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Established by an act written in 1789, it admitted its first students in 1795, describes itself as the first public university in the United States, and is part of the UNC System.Open the full entry, where he received an M.A. in cognitive psychology in August 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in August 1996.⁠[1][7]

In August 1998 he received a Ph.D. in business administration from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. The same year Kendall/Hunt published The Joy of Experimental Psychology, a textbook he wrote with Christine Hughes and David Eckerman.⁠[7]

From 1998 to 2008 he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry’s Sloan School of Management, where he held the title of Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics; from 2000 to 2010 he also held an appointment at the MIT Media Lab; during his time at MIT he was a principal investigator at the Media Lab and directed the Center for Advanced Hindsight and the eRationality Research Group.⁠[7][8][3]

He taught at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, in 2001–2002; spent the summer of 2004 as a researcher at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2005 to 2007.⁠[7][8]

In 2002 he and Klaus Wertenbroch of INSEAD published “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment” in the journal Psychological Science, arguing that externally imposed, evenly spaced deadlines for each task lead to better performance than self-set deadlines or a single final deadline. By August 2026 the paper had more than 2,100 citations on Google Scholar.⁠[9][10]

In February 2008 HarperCollins published his Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, which became a New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry bestseller. He writes: “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic.” Elizabeth Kolbert, reviewing it in The New Yorker, called it “a taxonomy of financial folly.”⁠[7][8][11]

From 2008 he was James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a senior fellow of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics; the Contemporary Authors entry gives 2007 as the year his Duke appointment began.⁠[7][3][8]

In June 2010 HarperCollins published his The Upside of Irrationality, which also became a New York Times bestseller.⁠[7][11]

In 2010 he said on NPR that dentists often disagree about whether X-rays show cavities, pointing to Delta Dental as his basis; he withdrew the claim after the company said that it could not have shared such information.⁠[12]

In 2012 he, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman published “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), arguing that asking people to sign an honesty statement at the top of a form rather than at the bottom reduces dishonesty; the article was edited by Daniel KahnemanDaniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman (1934–2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist who, with Amos Tversky, pioneered research on cognitive biases in judgment and decision-making and developed prospect theory; he received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and wrote the bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow.Open the full entry. Its third study was a field experiment in which an auto insurer in the southeastern United States collected odometer readings from 13,488 customers; those who signed at the top stated 2,400 more miles driven (10.3 percent) than those who signed at the bottom.⁠[13][14]

In June 2012 HarperCollins published his The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, a New York Times bestseller; in October of that year Mariner Books published The Best American Science and Nature Writing, which he edited.⁠[7][11]

With Yoav Shoham, a Stanford University computer science professor, and Jacob Bank he co-founded the time-management company Timeful, of which Jacob Bank was president and CEO. Timeful’s iOS app, launched in June 2014, used machine learning, data analysis and behavioral science to arrange users’ schedules, aiming to improve time management and reduce procrastination. The company raised $7 million from investors including Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, Kleiner Perkins, Data CollectiveDCVCDCVC (Data Collective) is an American deep tech venture capital firm founded in 2010 by Matt Ocko and Zachary Bogue, with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California. It invests in companies that use computing and AI to solve real-world problems in fields such as energy, climate, biomedicine, defense, space, and industry; as of October 2026 it had more than $4 billion in assets under management across 13 funds.Open the full entry, Greylock Partners, Israel’s Pitango Venture Capital and Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments; he devoted about 20 percent of his time to it.⁠[15][16]

In May 2015 Harper Perennial published his Irrationally Yours, based on his question-and-answer column “Ask Ariely” in The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry. From that year he was faculty director of the Envolve Center for Health Behavior Change at Washington University in St. Louis’s George Warren Brown School of Social Work.⁠[7][2]

On May 4, 2015, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry announced that it had acquired Timeful for an undisclosed price, which Globes wrote was believed to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Before the acquisition he had worked with Google as an outside consultant; Yoav Shoham joined Google full-time as chief scientist. Google planned to bring Timeful’s technology into Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs, and kept the existing iPhone app available without further development.⁠[15][16]

On February 24, 2016, the insurance start-up LemonadeLemonadeLemonade is a New York insurance technology company founded in 2015 by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger. It combines digital insurance and claims automation with a charitable Giveback program, spanning renters, home, pet, car and life products.Open the full entry announced that he would serve as its chief behavioral officer. In the announcement he said: “If you tried to create a system to bring out the worst in humans, it would look a lot like the insurance of today.” Shai WiningerShai WiningerShai Wininger is a technology entrepreneur, cofounder of Fiverr and Lemonade, and Lemonade’s President and a director. His work spans software engineering, product design, digital insurance and organizational automation. He served as Lemonade’s co-CEO from 2021 to 2023.Open the full entry, Lemonade’s co-founder and president, said the company believed that behavioral economics together with its technology would help it decrease fraud.⁠[11]

Shai Wininger wrote on the company blog that his work had profoundly influenced how Wininger thought about product design and user experience and that Lemonade was implementing his research in its product to increase overall trust, pointing to his team’s study in which asking people to recall the Ten Commandments significantly reduced cheating. His LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry profile shows that he left Lemonade at the end of 2020.⁠[17][12]

In November 2016 Simon & Schuster published his Payoff; from 2016 he was a visiting professor at AMC-UvA.⁠[18]

In November 2017 HarperCollins published Dollars and Sense, which he wrote with Jeff Kreisler. From 2018 he was a part-time professor at Aarhus University, and from 2021 he also held an appointment in the Division of Behavioral Medicine and Neurosciences of Duke University’s Department of Psychiatry.⁠[18]

In 2020 a group of researchers and the five original authors of the 2012 paper published a PNAS article reporting six studies that failed to replicate the original paper’s two laboratory studies; they did not repeat the insurance field experiment but noticed a baseline difference of about 15,000 miles between its two conditions, collected before random assignment, and speculated that randomization may have failed. The authors posted their new data and the 2012 data on OSF.⁠[13]

In late July 2021, after a group in Hong Kong found statistical anomalies, Psychological Science issued an expression of concern about a 2004 paper of his, adding an editor’s note; he did not have the original data to check against. “It’s a good thing for science to put a question mark [on] this,” he said.⁠[14][12]

On August 17, 2021, Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons, writing on their blog Data Colada with an anonymous team of researchers, analyzed the posted data from the 2012 paper’s field experiment: miles driven were uniformly distributed between 0 and 50,000, with nothing above 50,000; the second readings showed almost no rounded numbers, consistent with a random number generator; and the baseline readings appeared in equal numbers in two fonts, Calibri and Cambria, with almost every Calibri row having a Cambria “twin” whose mileage was higher by less than 1,000 miles. They concluded that the data had been fabricated “beyond any shadow of a doubt,” through at least two methods—duplicating and altering baseline data and generating all second readings with a random number generator capped at 50,000 miles—and called for mandatory public posting of research data.⁠[13]

Data Colada wrote that the field experiment was run under his supervision, that he was the only author in contact with the insurance company, and listed three possibilities: him, someone in his lab, or someone at the company; the posted Excel file’s properties named him as its creator and Nina Mazar as its last modifier, while the earlier version Mazar had received from him named him as both. On August 6, 2021, Mazar forwarded to the bloggers an email he had sent her on February 16, 2011, with that earlier version of the file attached; she had found that the effect ran opposite to the paper’s hypothesis, he said he had switched the condition labels while making them more descriptive, and she swapped them back. The post linked written responses from four of the original authors: Mazar, Gino, Ariely himself and Bazerman.⁠[13]

In his reply to Data Colada he wrote: “just to be clear, I was the only person responsible for this in this team.” He denied fabricating the data, saying that the numbers came from the insurance company; on NPR in 2023 he said: “Getting the data file was the extent of my involvement with the data.”⁠[19][20]

He said that it was tempting to think that he had something to do with creating the data in a fraudulent way, but denied doing so, and said that he would never have posted the data had he known it was fraudulent; he said he had stayed away from the details of data collection out of concern for privacy, which in retrospect “wasn’t a good choice.” He said the 2012 data “is not to be trusted” but that the underlying principle may still be valid, agreed with Data Colada’s conclusion that the data were faked and regretted not noticing earlier; he said he was not worried about his reputation because “science works over time and things fix themselves,” and that since 2012 his lab had been more involved in partners’ data collection, stored data in the cloud and regularly shared it publicly. He declined to name the insurer because of confidentiality agreements; correspondence seen by BuzzFeed News shows that he named The Hartford, a car insurer in Hartford, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, which did not respond to requests for comment at the time. He said his contacts at the insurer had all left and that none of them remembered what had happened. Asked when the experiment took place, he said he did not remember whether it was 2010 or 2011; he first said the company had sent the data as an Excel file and later said he did not know whether it had come in Excel or text format. The posted Excel file’s metadata shows that it was created in February 2011, while he had discussed the experiment’s results in a 2008 lecture and a 2009 essay.⁠[12]

The other four authors said they played no part in collecting the experiment’s data. Max Bazerman said he had questions about the “implausible data” when he read a draft in February 2011, that a co-author assured him the data were accurate and that he did not examine the file himself, and later said he wished he had worked harder to identify the fraud; Lisa Shu said the collaboration had started from assumed rather than earned trust; Francesca Gino said she had not been involved with the insurer or in the field experiment’s data collection, running or analysis; and Nina Mazar said she had not been involved in the field study, had no contact with the insurer and did not know who fabricated the data.⁠[12][14]

He said that after the concerns were raised, Duke University’s research integrity office interviewed him and reviewed his email; a Duke spokesperson declined to say how the review was conducted or what it found. Separately, an outside team failed to replicate the effect claimed in his 2008 study that recalling the Ten Commandments reduces cheating.⁠[12]

Max Bazerman and Lisa Shu had favored retraction in 2020, but the authors did not pursue it then. After the Data Colada post the five original authors asked PNAS to retract the paper. In September 2021 PNAS retracted it; the notice reads: “The editors are retracting this article and note that Simonsohn, Simmons, and Nelson have provided evidence to question the validity of the data in the article.” At the time the paper had been cited 180 times in Web of Science.⁠[14][12][19]

In 2022 he hosted a four-part program on Israel’s Kan 11 channel, with episodes on change and opinion, scarcity and equality, misfortune and luck, and lies and falsehood.⁠[4]

In 2022 an initial inquiry at Duke University found “sufficient evidence of the alleged misconduct to warrant a full investigation.”⁠[3]

In April 2022 NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry ordered a pilot for a crime drama inspired by Predictably Irrational, and on December 27, 2022, it ordered the show, The Irrational, to series, starring Jesse L. Martin and written by Arika Lisanne Mittman, with him as a consultant; its protagonist is a world-renowned professor of behavioral science who uses an unconventional approach to human behavior to help governments, law enforcement and corporations solve high-stakes cases.⁠[21]

In September 2023 HarperCollins published his Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, which draws on his conversations with people who hold misbeliefs to explore their worldview. From 2023 he was a consulting producer of the NBC series The Irrational, which NBC canceled in May 2025 after two seasons.⁠[18][22][3][23]

On June 17, 2023, Data Colada wrote that the data of the 2012 PNAS paper’s first study had also been tampered with, by a different person from the one who fabricated the third study’s data; the first study was run at UNC in 2010, and Francesca Gino, who was a professor at UNC before joining HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry in 2010, was the only author involved in collecting and analyzing its data. The post states that none of his co-authors—Shu, Gino, Mazar or Bazerman—fabricated the data of the third study, the insurance field experiment that he supervised; a footnote states that the fraudulent data came to the research team from his computer via emails he sent to his co-authors. It was the first of a series on four papers co-authored by Gino; the bloggers said they had shared their concerns with Harvard Business School in fall 2021, that Gino had been placed on administrative leave and that Harvard University had requested the retraction of three of the four papers. Gino later faced separate misconduct findings at Harvard.⁠[24][10]

In July 2023 the insurer The Hartford, which for years had not responded directly to his account, said it had pulled the data set it sent him and that it looked dramatically different from the one used in the paper: the company had provided data on about 3,700 policies, while the paper cited more than 13,000; it confirmed that the data was altered after it was given to him and before publication, and said that although some of the published study data was originally sourced from its data, “it is clear the data was manipulated inappropriately and supplemented by synthesized or fabricated data.” NPR’s program said that no one can say with certainty who falsified the data set.⁠[19][20]

The Hartford also said that the data it sent covered about 6,000 vehicles rather than the roughly 20,000 in the paper, and that the data showed no statistically significant difference between the two signing conditions.⁠[3]

Duke’s investigation of his research lasted more than a year and a half. In January 2024 he said that Duke had found him responsible for research misconduct but not for falsification; that the investigation found he should have “more thoroughly vetted the data and more diligently stored records about the data”; and that Duke had found “no evidence to show I was responsible for data falsification or knowingly used falsified data.” “I regret trusting the data,” he said, adding: “I do feel attacked. I feel unfairly so.”⁠[3][10]

Duke increased oversight of his center and reviewed its training and data-management practices; he was required to submit regular reports on research at the center and to complete an eight-week course on professionalism and integrity at Washington University in St. Louis. Duke declined to confirm the findings, a spokesman saying the university was “not in a position to confirm or fact-check anything on this.”⁠[3]

On April 2, 2024, he posted on his website a statement approved for posting by Duke University, saying that “After almost three years,” Duke had concluded its investigation into his conduct; the investigation committee assembled by Duke found no evidence to support claims that he falsified data or knowingly used falsified data, including in his role as a co-author of the 2012 PNAS paper, but determined that he “should have done more to prevent faulty data from being published.” He said the methodologies of the Center for Advanced Hindsight remained in line with values of integrity, transparency and accuracy, and that he had resumed his work at Duke at full speed.⁠[25]

In January 2026 the U.S. Department of Justice released about 3.5 million pages of material related to Jeffrey Epstein, gathered by the Federal Bureau of InvestigationFederal Bureau of InvestigationThe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the federal investigative agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. It grew out of a force of special agents organized by Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte in 1908, has used its present name since 1935 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.Open the full entry, in which his name appears 636 times. The emails, from about 2010 to 2018, include the two arranging coffee when their travel overlapped, coordinating meetings and discussing introductions; one exchange shows Epstein arranging a private tour of a Ferrari factory for him, and in September 2012, after discussing a possible meeting in New York, he wrote to Epstein asking for the name and email address of a woman who had been with Epstein, saying he would love to meet her again at some point. The materials do not allege criminal or unethical conduct by him or establish a financial or professional partnership between the two, and the files released so far have not shown evidence of wrongdoing on his part.⁠[26][27]

On February 2, 2026, he published an opinion piece in Duke’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, describing the contact as “infrequent, largely logistical, often mediated by assistants,” saying that Epstein’s interests did not overlap with his research, that he never received funding from Epstein, that he had “no connection” with Epstein’s criminal activity and that he was involved in no financial, professional or ongoing relationship with him. Duke University said it “takes the information released on Friday seriously” and was “carefully evaluating it,” adding that it could not comment on specific personnel actions that might be taken.⁠[27][26]

A few days after his opinion piece, Duke University closed three research centers, among them the Center for Advanced Hindsight, which he ran; a university spokesperson said the closure was unrelated to his ties to Epstein.⁠[28]

As of November 2026 the Center for Advanced Hindsight’s website remains online and calls him the center’s founder; it describes the center’s aim as making people “happier, healthier, and wealthier” with behavioral science, and its programs include the Common Cents Lab, which works on the financial well-being of low- and moderate-income people in the United States, and the Startup Lab, an academic incubator program for start-ups.⁠[29][30]

On August 7, 2026, he posted a statement on his website and on LinkedIn saying he had learned that the data behind the 2002 procrastination paper “contained serious anomalies”; he said the documentary record at his disposal was not sufficient to answer the questions raised and that after more than two decades his memory was “similarly insufficient,” and that he and his co-author would cooperate with the journal’s review and retraction processes.⁠[31][9]

Kyle Hyndman and Alberto Bisin failed to replicate the paper’s second study with newly collected data in a paper forthcoming in Psychological Science; Hyndman had received the original files from him by email in 2006. They disclosed that in October 2024, at the editors’ request, they had shared their analysis of the original file with him and asked to include a summary from him, and that he declined, arguing that the file might not contain authentic data.⁠[9][10]

On August 31, 2026, Data Colada analyzed the second study, in which 60 participants completed an incentivized proofreading task, and pointed to an implausibly large effect size (d = 2.5); 18 of the 20 participants in the last-day deadline condition had a “twin” with identical correction counts on all three tasks and an ID exactly 10 apart; measures that should be strongly correlated were barely correlated; and only 11.7 percent of the times participants gave for their work were round numbers, close to chance, compared with 85 percent in the replication. The bloggers concluded that the data were “severely tampered with or fabricated to produce the desired results.”⁠[9]

On September 2, 2026, a second Data Colada post examined the paper’s first study, a comparison of two sections of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology executive-education course: in the self-chosen-deadline section, the final grades of 13 of 49 students differed from a simple average of their components by whole numbers, suggesting manual editing, and 12 of the 13 changes moved in the direction of the paper’s hypothesis while the section average (85.67) stayed the same. The t-test in a 2001 INSEAD working-paper version of the article matches the unaltered grades, while the published result matches the altered grades, which the bloggers read as evidence that the data were altered after the first submission.⁠[32][10]

Data Colada sent drafts on July 20, 2026, to him, Klaus Wertenbroch, Hyndman and Bisin, and the journal’s editor-in-chief, Simine Vazire; he did not reply to the bloggers’ three emails. Klaus Wertenbroch said he had never had access to the data for any of the studies, called the analysis “sophisticated and thorough” and asked the journal to retract the paper; Simine Vazire said the journal was considering next steps in accordance with COPE guidelines. As of September 2, 2026, Psychological Science was reviewing the retraction request, and Duke University had not responded to the Duke student newspaper The Chronicle’s request for comment on whether it knew of the allegations or planned to investigate.⁠[9][10]

As of November 2026 the faculty page of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business lists him as Professor of Business Administration in the marketing area, with research interests in behavioral economics.⁠[6]

His podcast The Upside of Down, which he hosts and executive-produces, consists of eight conversations of about 30 minutes each with guests about living with serious disability or physical trauma and what can still feel meaningful or enjoyable; it is produced by DDC International and Newfruit Media.⁠[33]

His wife is Sumi, and they have two children, Amit and Neta. A 2011 profile states that Sumi was student projects coordinator at the Duke Global Health Institute and that the couple were hired by Duke at the same time; he said then that a typical day began with waking his son, making him breakfast and driving him to school before reaching Fuqua just after 8 a.m.⁠[8][1]

He has long planned a guide to cooking and life, Dining Without Crumbs, subtitled The Art of Eating over the Sink in 2011 and The Art of Eating Over the Kitchen Sink on his website. He recalled that publishers did not take it and advised him to write a research book first, which became Predictably Irrational; in 2011 he said he had returned to working on the cookbook, and his website still lists it as a work in progress. The website also has a short video answering why he has a half beard.⁠[1][5][4]

His website also lists the illustrated book Amazing Decisions: The Illustrated Guide to Improving Business Deals and Family Meals and a video version of Predictably Irrational issued by LIT Videobooks.⁠[22]

He wrote the children’s series The Adventures of Professor D., illustrated by Omer Hoffmann and published by Lama, in three books about a boy named David, known as PD, who uses social science knowledge and experiments to understand and improve his situation, helped by his robotic dog, Dot, who represents the rational side of things; the three books deal with procrastination and homework, allowance and money, and dishonesty.⁠[34]

His other works include the film Dishonesty and the card game Irrational Game, both meant to bring his research to the public; one of his TED talks has more than 10 million views.⁠[6][4][3]

He is a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight; the center had more than 40 employees in 2019 and about half that number in early 2024, and its corporate clients include Procter & GambleProcter & GambleThe Procter & Gamble Company is a multinational consumer goods company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry, Eli LillyEli Lilly and CompanyEli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) is a U.S. pharmaceutical company founded in 1876 by Colonel Eli Lilly and headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.Open the full entry and MetLife.⁠[6][3]

In 2013 he co-founded Irrational Labs with Kristen Berman. He also co-founded Irrational Capital and BEWorks, and in early 2024 he was chief behavioral officer of Epilog.⁠[35][3]

He is listed as one of the founding members of the email-app company Emailio. Emailio co-founder Martin StoyanovMartin StoyanovMartin Stoyanov is a software developer and entrepreneur from Bulgaria and a co-founder of the email client Emailio. Emailio was a company in Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 batch, and he was selected as a Thiel Fellow in 2014.Open the full entry said the team had built an email app just for him, which he liked so much that he wanted to join the team; in the Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry launch post Martin Stoyanov wrote that the team had researched email problems with Dan Ariely’s behavioral research lab at Duke University.⁠[36][37]

His honors include the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory Graduate Student Award (1995–1996); the American Marketing Association’s John A. Howard Doctoral Dissertation Award (1998); the Judgment and Decision Making Society’s Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award (2000); the Marketing Science Institute’s Best Paper Award (2001, for “Wine Online,” with John G. Lynch Jr.); participation in the Rothschild Memorial Symposia of the Institute for Advanced Studies (13th Summer School in Economic Theory, 2002); and the Society for Consumer Psychology’s Early Career Contribution Award (2003).⁠[7]

In 2008 he received the IgNobel Award in Medicine and served as president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making for 2008–2009; in 2009 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award of the psychology department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a finalist for the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award; in 2010 “Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions,” written with Baba Shiv and Ziv Carmon, won the William F. O’Dell Award.⁠[7]

In 2011 he received an IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry Faculty Award and was the Ethel & James Valone Visiting Professor in Plastic Surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; in 2012 he became a contributing editor of WIRED UK, an honorary professor of Universidad del Pacífico in Peru and an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society of Trinity College Dublin; in 2013 “The Dishonesty of Honest People,” written with On Amir and Nina Mazar, won the William F. O’Dell Award; in 2014 he received North Carolina State University’s William C. Friday Excellence in Leadership and Service Award; and in 2015 he received an honorary doctorate from Erasmus University Rotterdam and, for “The IKEA Effect,” written with Michael Norton and Daniel Mochon, the Journal of Consumer Psychology’s C. W. Park Outstanding Contribution Award.⁠[7]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[38]

Duke University: Official website: https://duke.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[39]

Lemonade: Official website: https://www.lemonade.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[40]

Center for Advanced Hindsight: Official website: https://advanced-hindsight.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[29]

Personal website: https://danariely.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[41][6]

Substack newsletter: https://danariely.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[29]

X: Public account: https://x.com/danariely (opens in a new window).⁠[41]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danariely (opens in a new window).⁠[41]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/danariely/ (opens in a new window).⁠[41]

Facebook: Public account: https://www.facebook.com/DanArielyOfficial (opens in a new window).⁠[41]

Apple Podcasts: Public show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-upside-of-down/id1706447947 (opens in a new window). The show is The Upside of Down, which he hosts.⁠[33]