Why’s It So Hard to Get People to Change Their Behavior?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, from panicked buying to refusing to wear masks. The coronavirus pandemic has brought out the stranger side of our human behavior, but why do crises sometimes make us act so oddly, sometimes even against our own interests? Dan Ariely is a professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a specialist in irrationality. It’s personal for him after an accident at age 18 left him with terrible burns on much of his body and permanent hair loss on one side of his face. During his excruciating recovery, he first started to observe human quirks and he began a lifelong quest to unravel them as he explains now to our Hari Sreenivasan.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, Thanks. Dan Ariely, thanks for joining us. So, 2020 has been a horrible year for most people except probably behavioral economists and social scientists who are like, wow, look at all this data, look at people believing and behaving irrationally. We are past 11 million cases now. Why is it so hard to get people to modify behavior for what would be considered a public good? We’re not even asking them to write a check or take money out of their own wallets, but just to wear a mask, for example.

DAN ARIELY, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS, DUKE UNIVERSITY: Well, first of all, sadly, yes, every time there’s a disaster we rediscover how important social science is. It happened in 2007 and 2008, it’s happening now. And the details of where we need social science is incredible, right, how do we give instructions that are clear, how do we get people to believe, what do we do with distance education, like the range, works from home? Really quite incredible. But you said that it will be — we’re not asking people to give money. It actually would have been easier to ask people to give money because when you give money, you give once and when you think about something like handwashing and wearing a mask, this is something that people have to do repeatedly. And here’s the thing, imagine — let’s take something like texting and driving, right. Imagine that you think to yourself that the probability of texting and driving and something terrible happening is about 1 percent. And one day you drive along and your phone vibrates and you become slightly a different person and you check your phone and nothing happened because the probability is only 1 percent. At the end of this, you say to yourself, maybe it’s not that dangerous. Maybe it’s not 1 percent probability that something will be bad, maybe it’s 0.9, and then you do it again and again and again. The same thing happens with behaviors like this. So, imagine we go with the mask and one day we forgot or we’re in the outdoor space and nothing bad happened. The experience basically is teaching you to the wrong lesson until, of course, it’s too late. So, that’s the first thing, that low probability events are things that we have a very hard time because our intuition is that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter because every time we’re wrong, we’re not punished for it. We say, hey, things were OK. The other thing about public goods is what happens when we see other people misbehaving? So, I’ll describe you an experiment. I’ll do it quickly, but I think it’s a really important experiment. In this experiment we take 10 people. Randomly selected. They will never meet anybody else. And we call them every morning and we say, we’re giving you $10 and you can keep the $10 to yourself or you can put it in the public pot. If you keep it to yourself, you have $10. If you put it in the public pot, all the money you put in the public pot will multiply throughout the day five times, in the evening, equally divided by everyone, and that’s the game. Now, what happens? They won — 10 people $10, everybody puts their money in the central pot. 10 people $10, $100, multiply five times, $500, in the evening equally divided by everybody, everybody gets $50. And life it good, right, you wake up with $10, you go to sleep with $50. And the metaphor that together we could do things that we couldn’t separately. We could build hospitals and schools and roads and all kinds of things when we put our resourced together. But one day one person puts zero in. That person keeps the $10. Now, there are nine people who puts money in, $90, multiplied five times, $450. In the evening, equally divided by 10, everybody gets $45.

SREENIVASAN: Except for the guy who didn’t take his money in, right, he’s got more?

ARIELY: That’s right. He gets 45 from the public pool but he also has his $10 in the morning. He basically betrayed the public good and made $5. And that’s what happens when we say to ourself, let’s be selfish. If everybody else wears a mask, I don’t need to wear a mask. I can have a good day and other people would pay the price. But here’s what happened the next day in this game. The next day or two days later, as you would expect, nobody puts anything in. And we have kind of two equilibria. There’s equilibria with everybody participates and everybody benefits. An equilibria where nobody participates and nobody benefits. And the good equilibria is very fragile. It’s enough for one person to betray and the whole thing deteriorates. The bad equilibria where nobody puts money and nobody helps is very stable. Let’s say one day after three months nobody puts, nobody puts, nobody puts. One day, three people puts money in. What happens the next day? It goes back to 100 percent? No, it goes to zero. So, if you think about us looking at the world around us, we say, look at us, we’re behaving well but these other people who are destroying the public good and we feel like suckers for participating. Like, you know, it’s kind of amazing. If we all wore masks, washed our hands and kept social distance for a month this thing would be over, right, across the world, like, there’s no question about it. They are saying, you know, do we have a cure? Yes, we have a cure, social distancing, masks, washing your hands, but we all need to do it all the time for a period. We just can’t seem to be able to do it because the moment some people are betraying the public good there’s more and more pressure for more and more people to do that.

SREENIVASAN: In the United States, you have some people who are rebelling because they feel that this is an oppression of them. You have other people who are just it’s almost like they are fatigued. They are tired of being scared. And —

ARIELY: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: Then they do what they want to do.

ARIELY: Yes. You know, the thing with, you know, staying at home and not meeting people, very, very stressful, right, and if you have little kids at home this is extra stressful. You know, we see dramatic increases in domestic violence. We see increase in depression. I mean, this is a tough — it’s a very, very tough period, and you can imagine that it’s very, very depressing. And one of the things that is so difficult is it’s really hard to plan. So, if you think about, you know, two years ago, planning for summer vacation. How many months before summer vacation were you already thinking about it and enjoying it? Now, we have no plans. We have no plans. We also have very little control over our environment, and one of the things that gives us a lot of resilience is control. We decide what to do and so on. All of a sudden, a lot of the control was taken away from us. Somebody else can decide to not let us leave home or somebody else tells us not to go into this thing or close our business, all kinds of things like that. So, a lot of control has been gone, but if you think about the combination of no planning, like we don’t know what the plan is. You know, if somebody told us, OK, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do four weeks of partial lockdown. If we see things are getting better — in Germany, by the way, they did a very good job. They told people, here are the districts and, in each district, here are the rules and as long as you have less, than eight people — eight per million we’ll do this rule and if you have more we’ll do this rule, and everything was — kind of people knew what to plan for and where things are. We don’t seem to have a driving force, like where is this going? And so, lack of planning from above, a lack of control altogether creating lots of psychological anxiety and lack of control. And then, we want to do something. We want to feel that we’re in control. So, some people do what’s called retail therapy, right, we can exert control by spending money and, you know, moving merchandise from this place to our possession, and people are just rebelling, but this rebellion is really kind of a way to exert our individuality and our agency, and we are actors, we’re not just passive capturing and listening to what’s going on.

SREENIVASAN: The other major crisis in the United States for these last several months has been the political storm that was the election, right? Here we are now in a situation where there’s a massive trust gap that people have, even after the election. There are people who are willing to take to the streets and don’t find the results of the election legitimate because it wasn’t to their liking. They believe a narrative that there has been widespread fraud when there is no evidence of that. How do you rebuild that kind of trust and institutions? I mean, you’re advising President- Elect Joe Biden, he’s got a pretty big job in front of him.

ARIELY: So, the thing with trust is you erode it over a long time and it’s very, very tough to build it a little bit overtime, right? If somebody right now doesn’t believe in the Supreme Court or doesn’t believe something, you know, how would they all of a sudden start believing them? How that happens? And it turns out it’s very tough. And the thing to do is not to — like there’s a slippery slope downward and there’s no slippery slope upwards. What you need to do for trust is you need to basically say, we’re closing the books and restarting something new. Think about something like the Truth and Reconciliation Act in South Africa. There was this terrible period of apartheid and then the question is, how do we move — how do they move from apartheid? And there’s no smooth transition. And they do the Truth and Reconciliation Act and people stood on the stage and basically said, here are the list of all the awful things we have done and we’re really sorry about it. Now, it doesn’t solve apartheid, it doesn’t — you know, you could decide if you want to forgive them or not, but it does say there’s an end to a period and something new is starting. The rebels in Columbia did similar things, right. This is like the Catholic confession, it’s the same principle, right, you basically say, I’m sorry about what happened so far. The (INAUDIBLE), we’re starting a new page. And I think that Biden needs to do something like that, right, where he needs to basically say, OK, we’ve been separated. We’ve had these questions about what’s true and false about media. Here are the new rules of the game. Here’s how we’re going to deal with the truth. Here’s how we’re going to deal with the media. Here’s how we’re going to deal with the development of the country. Here’s how we’re going to appoint people. Here are the rules of behavior and be transparent about it. Now, you know, when you trust somebody like if you think about trusting your significant other, you don’t need to see them all the time to know what they do. You just trust them that they have your best interest in mind. On the period when you don’t have trust, you want espionage, right? You want to say, look, I really don’t trust you that much. I just want to see what you’re doing so you’re not doing anything to hurt me, right, so you could — so, in the period — so, I think Biden needs to have a new contract and here are the rules and so on, but he also need to say, for the period now until — I’m telling you this and the period where I build trust, I’m going to allow you, Americans, to have more espionage. I’m going to basically give you more access to what is going on so you will rest assured that I have your best interest in mind, because you can’t fix it all at once. I think both of those are needed — three things, putting an end to it, new contract and for a little bit, increase dramatically transparency, so people can see what the government is actually doing, how decisions are being made to fix this.

SREENIVASAN: Speaking of not true, we are coming off of a period of four years where I think “The Washington Post” has documented something like 22,000, they call them false or misleading statements, you can call them lies. What does that do, not just to the office of the presidency, but our relationship with truth, especially when it’s supposed to come from a trusted source?

ARIELY: So, there’s a story in the bible that God comes to Sarah and said, Sarah, you’re going to have a son, and Sarah laughs and she says, how can I have a son when my husband is so old? Well, he says, don’t worry, you’ll have a son. And a then God goes to Abraham and says, Abraham, you’re going to have a son, and Abraham says, did you tell Sarah? And God says, yes. And Abraham continues and he says, and what did Sarah said and God lies. God said, Sarah said how could she have a son when she is so old. And the religious scholars wondered, how could God lie and their conclusion was it’s OK to lie for peace at home. And this is really the story. The story of lying, there are very few people that enjoy lying for lying’s sake. But the fact is we have many human values. I care about your feelings, like God in Abraham’s case didn’t want to offend him and I want my party to do better. I care about global warming. I care about all kinds of things, and the question in the hierarchy of values, where is honesty? And I did a lot of research in the previous election to try and understand why was Trump’s base not concerned about him not being honest? And, you know, the people — the Democrats would hear Trump saying something that was not true and they were saying lying, lying, lying. What the Republicans heard was committed to our cause even at the cost of lying, right? He was basically saying, I care about abolishing Obamacare, about changing taxes, about all kinds of things, stopping regulations on pollution. He’s saying, I want to do all kinds of things and I’m willing to lie to do this because our values are more important to us. So, the real challenge is, where is honesty in the hierarchy of values? And I think that what has happened is that it’s at the lower place. Now, let’s say you believe that global warming is a dramatic problem in the world and we have to deal with this. Ask yourself, would you be willing to vote for a president that would lie to the other side about the danger of global warming just to get these idiots to agree to do something? You know, I’m not asking to say it here, but think about this, right. I tell you here’s a president. He’s willing to lie, to stab this back for a purpose that we think is very important, like reducing emission globally. Would you say, you know what, I really care about the truth, but right now, global warming looks like a bigger threat to me so and I’m willing to sacrifice truth for global warming just for the next 10 years until we solve it then we’ll go back to the truth. The problem is we don’t get back to the truth. Once you have a political system where people are not honest, it’s very hard to change the values later. So, in my view, Republicans voted for other values. It’s not that they have no ethics. They voted for things that they cared about at the sacrifice of the truth. But now, we’re stuck with the truth being very low as a value in the political system, and it’s very, very hard to recover from that without, you know, the Truth and Reconciliation act and making real steps to try and improve it.

SREENIVASAN: You mentioned in the public good problem that as soon as somebody violates that trust that the system collapses. Have we reached that point when it comes to this experiment that is American democracy? Have we violated enough trusts that our democracy as a whole is threatened?

ARIELY: So, I think democracy is threatened, but I’m optimistic. I think, you know, there’s no question that we’re in the fork on the road, it can go in all kinds of bad directions and there’s no question that there’s some very threatening forces. But I’m optimistic. I think that the backbone of American democracy and the institutions and so on are strong. So, I’m optimistic that we’ll have a new wave that will change our direction. It’s not that it can’t go badly. I can see how it can go badly, but my view is that the institutions of democracy and the beliefs that are so engrained in Americans will win over time.

SREENIVASAN: Dan Ariely, thanks so much for joining us.

ARIELY: My pleasure.