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Introduction
Publications
Publications (141)
Background
It is unknown if digital applications may improve guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT) and outcomes in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF).
Methods and Results
CONNECT-HF included an optional, prospective ancillary study of a mobile health application among hospitalized patients for HFrEF. Digital users were matche...
Introduction
: Clinicians caring for heart failure patients with reduced ejection fraction often fail to achieve optimal use of guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT), which increases risk of readmission and/or death. Health system-level interventions have not consistently improved GDMT and factors associated with success in adopting GDMT are po...
Importance
Adoption of guideline-directed medical therapy for patients with heart failure is variable. Interventions to improve guideline-directed medical therapy have failed to consistently achieve target metrics, and limited data exist to inform efforts to improve heart failure quality of care.
Objective
To evaluate the effect of a hospital and...
PURPOSE
Hope is a modifiable entity that can be augmented. We evaluated the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of a short intervention to increase hopefulness in patients with advanced breast cancer and oncologists.
METHODS
We enrolled eligible participants to two cohorts: one for patients with metastatic breast cancer and one for medical, r...
Background
Risk perception, influenced and biased by multiple factors, can affect behavior.
Objective
To assess the variability of physician perceptions of catching COVID-19.
Design
Cross sectional, random stratified sample of physicians registered with Sermo, a global networking platform open to verified and licensed physicians.
Main outcome me...
The normative value of a medium of exchange is derived from the best consumption that it permits. Adding potential uses can increase the normative value of a medium of exchange but not decrease it. In two large preregistered experiments (total N = 2205), including one with incentive-compatible measures, we find that the perceived value of a medium...
Echo chambers in public debates are thought to emerge because people display greater preference for those holding similar political views. However, this idea requires careful testing because similarity correlates with other quantities which may drive interpersonal attraction, such as differences in political orientation, attitude extremity, and cer...
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas such as deciding how to assign scarce medical resources, or whether it is acceptable to share sensitive private data to effectively trace the virus. Here, we aimed at unfolding the reasoning processes underlying people’s responses to these and other contemporary moral problems. We report data...
Background
Latin America ranks among the regions with the highest level of intake of sugary beverages in the world. Innovative strategies to reduce the consumption of sugary drinks are necessary.
Purpose
Evaluate the effect of a one-off priest-led intervention on the choice and preference of soda beverages.
Methods
We conducted a pragmatic cluste...
The group polarization phenomenon is a widespread human bias with no apparent geographical or cultural boundaries [1]. Although the conditions that breed extremism have been extensively studied [2-5], comparably little research has examined how to depolarize attitudes in people who already embrace extreme beliefs. Previous studies have shown that d...
Physiological discomfort is commonly cited as a barrier for initiating and persisting with exercise. Although individuals may think of physiological discomfort as determined by physical sensations, it can also be influenced by cognitive and emotional factors. We explored the impacts of interpreting the purpose of pain as a sign of muscle building (...
Many therapies have been shown to improve outcomes for patients with heart failure (HF) in controlled settings, but there are limited data available to inform best practices for hospital and post-discharge quality improvement initiatives. The CONNECT-HF study is a prospective, cluster-randomized trial of 161 hospitals in the United States with a 2×...
Why does honesty matter? When you leave your valuables on the lunch table or use a bank account to save money, you're relying on the honesty of others. While it's easy to convince yourself that a small lie is harmless, cheating is a slippery slope: dishonesty breeds more dishonesty. It's important to create environments where it's easier to do the...
The development of artificial intelligence has led researchers to study the ethical principles that should guide machine behavior. The challenge in building machine morality based on people’s moral decisions, however, is accounting for the biases in human moral decision-making. In seven studies, this paper investigates how people’s personal perspec...
Every day, billions of us receive smartphone notifications. Designed to distract, these interruptions capture and monetize our time and attention. Though smartphones are incredibly helpful, their current notification systems impose underappreciated, yet considerable, mental costs; like a slot machine, they exploit our inherent psychological bias fo...
We investigate how the perceived fairness of an income distribution depends on the beliefs about the process that generates the inequality. Specifically, we examine how two crucial features of this process affect fairness views: (1) Procedural justice - equal treatment of all; (2) Agency – one's ability to determine his/her income. We do this in a...
Background:
Surgeons present patients with complex information at the perioperative appointment. Emotions likely play a role in surgical decision-making, and disgust is an emotion of revulsion at a stimulus that can lead to avoidance.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of disgust on intention to undergo surgical res...
The mechanisms that lead to overeating and the consumption of tempting, unhealthy foods have been studied extensively, but the compensatory actions taken afterwards have not. Here we describe the naïve models individuals hold around dietary splurges (single bouts of overeating) and associated weight changes. Across six online experiments, we found...
Tax refunds give many low-and moderate-income (LMI) households a rare opportunity to save for unexpected expenses. We conducted three experiments aimed at increasing tax-time savings by LMI consumers. In a large field experiment, the most effective intervention increased the average savings deposits by about 50%. Delivered as people filed taxes onl...
Purpose:
The research on cancer treatment decision-making focuses on dyads; the full "triad" of patients, oncologists, and caregivers remains largely unstudied. We investigated how all members of this triad perceive and experience decisions related to treatment for advanced cancer.
Methods:
At an academic cancer center, we enrolled adult patient...
Für Dan Ariely von der Duke University in Durham (USA) steht fest: Lüge und Täuschung wurzeln tief im menschlichen Denken. Der Verhaltensökonom erklärt, warum der Hang zur Verstellung aus unserem Leben nicht wegzudenken ist.
Follow the millennial generation's four golden rules of personal finance
Naive modeling for blood pressure adherence.
Modern humans live in an “exploded” network with unusually large circles of trust that form due to prosociality toward unfamiliar people (i.e. xenophilia). In a set of experiments we demonstrate that semi-free ranging bonobos (Pan paniscus) – both juveniles and young adults – also show spontaneous responses consistent with xenophilia. Bonobos volun...
Recent evidence has highlighted the potential benefits of affect- and self-regulated exercise prescriptions for the promotion of physical activity and exercise behavior (Baldwin et al., 2016; Williams et al., 2015, 2016). However, questions remain about which characteristics of the exercise prescriptions make them more effective. Objectives This st...
Behavioral challenges are often present in human illness, so behavioral economics is increasingly being applied in healthcare settings to better understand why patients choose healthy or unhealthy behaviors. The application of behavioral economics to healthcare settings parallels recent shifts in policy and reimbursement structures that hold provid...
Objectives:
Confidentiality of health information is an important aspect of the physician patient relationship. The use of digital medical records has made data much more accessible. To prevent data leakage, many countries have created regulations regarding medical data accessibility. These regulations require a unique user ID for each medical sta...
‘Choice architects’ are responsible for designing environments that guide decision-making, and thus must consider the inherent tradeoffs that accompany every choice. This examination of privacy decision-making places privacy considerations into context, and accordingly recommends a method (signal detection theory) for choice architects to define an...
Self-control depletion has been linked both to increased selfish behavior and increased susceptibility to situational cues. The present research tested two competing hypotheses about the consequence of depletion by measuring how people allocate rewards between themselves and another person. Seven experiments analyzed behavior in standard dictator g...
The ancient power of fear can lead us to downplay today's big risks and seek succour in unlikely places, say Dan Ariely and Vlad Chituc
Dishonesty is an integral part of our social world, influencing domains ranging from finance and politics to personal relationships. Anecdotally, digressions from a moral code are often described as a series of small breaches that grow over time. Here we provide empirical evidence for a gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty and reveal a neu...
Behavioral research offers several proven strategies for boosting turnout on Election Day
Ellen Langer’s early observation that people feel a false sense of connection to uncontrollable events has led to a long line of research, originating with Langer’s illusion of control and spanning a wide array of studies on the endowment effect, the IKEA effect, and the not-invented-here bias. Ellen Langer’s contributions to the study of irrationa...
Visceral states like thirst, hunger, and fatigue can alter motivations, predictions, and even memory. Across 3 studies, we demonstrate that such "hot" states can also shift moral standards and increase dishonest behavior. Compared to participants who had just eaten or who had not yet exercised, hungry and thirsty participants were more likely to be...
We provide new large-scale experimental evidence on policies that aim to boost household saving out of income tax refunds. Households that filed income tax returns with an online tax preparer and chose to receive their refund electronically were randomized into eight treatment groups, which received different combinations of motivational saving pro...
There is a paucity of methods for improving the affective experience of exercise. We tested a novel method based on discoveries about the relation between exercise intensity and pleasure, and lessons from behavioral economics. We examined the effect of reversing the slope of pleasure during exercise from negative to positive on pleasure and enjoyme...
Previous experiments have found that subjecting participants to cognitive load leads to poorer decision making, consistent with dual-system models of behavior. Rather than taxing the cognitive system, this paper reports the results of an experiment that takes a complementary approach: arousing the emotional system. The results indicate that exposur...
The idea of interviewing Dan Ariely was somehow latent on my mind since I started being interested in cognitive psychology and cognitive behavior psychotherapy, but actually got more ardent ever since irrationality became a research topic for his team at Duke University. I picked him as an interviewee thinking not only at his exceptional skills as...
The Refund to Savings (R2S) initiative aims to help low- and moderateincome (LMI) households build short-term contingency savings by providing motivation and opportunity to save their tax refunds, the largest single sum many households receive all year. Other research on tax-time interventions has yielded promising findings (Key et al. 2012; Tufano...
This article began as an adversarial collaboration between two groups of researchers with competing views on a longstanding question: Does familiarity promote or undermine interpersonal attraction? As we explored our respective positions, it became clear that the limitations of our conceptualizations of the familiarity-attraction link, as well as t...
Childbirth is usually the most painful event of a mother's life, and resonates in individual and collective memory for years. The current study examined the relationship between the experience of labor pain and its recollection 2 days and 2 months after delivery. We found that despite the exceptional physical and emotional experiences of childbirth...
Three experiments tested the effects of ego depletion on economic decision making. Participants completed a task either requiring self-control or not. Then participants learned about the trust game, in which senders are given an initial allocation of $10 to split between themselves and another person, the receiver. The receiver receives triple the...
We propose a new means by which non-profits can induce donors to give today and commit to giving in the future: contingent match incentives, in which matching is made contingent on the percentage of others who give (e.g., “if X% of others give, we will match all donations”). A field experiment shows that a 75% contingent match (where matches “kick...
Pay-for-performance programs aim to upgrade health care quality by tailoring financial incentives for desirable behaviors. While Medicare and many private insurers are charging ahead with pay-for-performance, researchers have been unable to show that it benefits patients. Findings from the new field of behavioral economics challenge the traditional...
This research examined the effect of alcohol intoxication on the propensity to behave inequitably and responses to inequitable divisions of rewards. Intoxicated and sober participants played ten rounds of a modified ultimatum game in two studies. Whereas intoxicated and sober participants were similarly generous in the proposals they made to their...
Background and Purpose:
Low levels of contingency savings is a challenge for millions of American families and is a big contributor to family stress, vulnerability, and instability. With currently available resources, about half of households are economically vulnerable. This vulnerability has implications for social work.
Research on small pil...
We investigate how the perceived fairness of income distributions depends on the beliefs about the process that generated the inequality. Specifically, we examine how two crucial features of this process affect fairness views: (1) Procedural justice - equal treatment of all, (2) Agency - one's ability to determine his/her income. We do this in a la...
Taming greed in favor of cooperation would benefit both individuals and society
American health care is transitioning to electronic physician ordering. These computerized systems are unique because they allow custom order interfaces. Although these systems provide great benefits, there are also potential pitfalls, as the behavioral sciences have shown that the very format of electronic interfaces can influence decision making....
Results from Trautmann and colleagues' large, representative survey of Dutch people suggest a more nuanced relationship between class and ethics than previous research has demonstrated (Trautmann, Van de Kuilen, & Zeckhauser, 2013, this issue). Following their analysis, we suggest that it is unlikely that either upper- or lower-class people are une...
An unprecedented number of relationships begin online, propelling online dating into a billion-dollar industry. However, while the online dating industry has created an effective mechanism for matching and accessing profiles, it has largely neglected the quality of communication between individuals. We investigate whether the lack of nonverbal cues...
A large body of survey research offers evidence that citizens are not always fully aware of the economic and political realities in their respective countries. Norton and Ariely (2011) extended this research to the domain of wealth inequality, showing that Americans were surprisingly unaware of the shape of the wealth distribution in America. Using...
Background:
The Refund to Savings Initiative (R2S) is a unique partnership between academic experts in asset building and behavioral economics with Intuit, the makers of TurboTax tax preparation software. R2S seeks to improve the financial health of American households by seamlessly integrating a low-touch, scalable, low-cost opportunity and moti...
Consumers frequently encounter moral violations in everyday life. They watch movies and television shows about crime and deception, hear news reports of corporate fraud and tax evasion, and hear gossip about cheaters and thieves. How does exposure to moral violations influence consumption? Because moral violations arouse disgust and because disgust...
A prevalent stereotype is that people become less risk taking and more cautious as they get older. However, in laboratory studies, findings are mixed and often reveal no age differences. In the current series of experiments, we examined whether age differences in risk seeking are more likely to emerge when choices include a certain option (a sure g...
Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that gui...
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their financial self-interests-at great costs to society. We test an easy-to-implement method to disco...
Motivation may decrease and gaming of the system is rife
In a linked article (doi:10.1136/bmj.e5047), Glasziou and colleagues highlight the tenuous nature of the evidence that financial reward systems work in healthcare settings.1 They propose that before pay for performance schemes are implemented the potential benefits and harms should be assess...
Personal calendars have long played a major role in time management, but they have evolved little over the years, and their contribution to productivity has stagnated. Inspired by logical theories of intention as well as experimental results on human productivity, and leveraging the power of optimization algorithms, we seek to reinvent the digital...
To describe the association between an increasing number of coexisting conditions and locus of control (LOC), a psychological construct reflecting the degree to which one perceives circumstances to be controlled by personal actions (internal LOC) versus outside factors (external LOC) in older adults.
Cross-sectional study using survey data from the...
Lack of thinking, biases, and misunderstanding of our motivations affect many aspects our day-to-day behaviors both in the workplace and in our personal lives. Using some basic lessons from behavioral economics, I will try to shed some light on our odd but interesting nature, emphasizing the way that this understanding can bring us closer to a path...
We estimate mate preferences using a novel data set from an online dating service. The data set contains detailed information
on user attributes and the decision to contact a potential mate after viewing his or her profile. This decision provides the
basis for our preference estimation approach. A potential problem arises if the site users strategi...