Beware conflicts of interest | Dan Ariely

Summary

The speaker humorously recounts his experience with a doctor who wanted to tattoo his face to improve symmetry, highlighting the doctor's conflict of interest due to needing a third patient for a paper. He reflects on how incentives can bias advice and decisions, even in science, and emphasizes the importance of recognizing and managing our own conflicts of interest. The talk concludes with a hopeful note on the potential for improvement when we understand the mechanisms behind our failures.

Takeaways

• 🏥 The speaker had a unique treatment proposed by a hospital's burn department chairman to tattoo black dots on his face for symmetry.
• 🤔 The treatment raised questions about the permanence and adaptability as the speaker's hair would turn white with age.
• 👨‍⚕️ The chairman's strong push for the treatment was driven by the need for a third patient case to complete a research paper.
• 🧐 The speaker reflects on the pressure and guilt trip he experienced, which was unusual compared to other treatments he declined.
• 🔬 The speaker shares a personal anecdote where he initially wanted to exclude an outlier from his experiment due to the participant's unexpected performance.
• 🤷‍♂️ The realization that the outlier's inclusion or exclusion could significantly affect the study's outcome led to a deeper consideration of biases.
• 👁️‍🗨 The speaker emphasizes that people often try to influence others' decisions based on their own incentives, which can lead to biased advice.
• 🤝 He acknowledges the difficulty in recognizing when our own incentives are clouding our judgment and decisions.
• 🛡 The importance of being aware of conflicts of interest and the need to actively guard against them to prevent undesirable outcomes is highlighted.
• 🌟 The speaker concludes on a hopeful note, suggesting that understanding our biases and conflicts of interest can lead to improvements and better decision-making.

Q & A

What treatment did the chairman of the burn department suggest to Dan, and why?

The chairman suggested tattooing little black dots on the right side of Dan's face, where he had no hair due to burn scars, in order to create symmetry between both sides of his face.

What concern did Dan raise about the proposed treatment?

Dan asked what would happen when he got older and his hair turned white, wondering how the black dots would look at that point.

Why did Dan ultimately refuse the treatment?

Dan refused the treatment because he was uncertain about its long-term effects and the chairman's explanation about using lasers to whiten the dots in the future did not fully convince him.

What did Dan learn from the chairman's deputy about the real reason behind the guilt trip?

Dan learned from the deputy that the chairman needed a third patient for a paper they were writing on the procedure, which was the reason behind the pressure he felt to undergo the treatment.

How did Dan relate his experience with the burn department chairman to his own research work?

Dan reflected on a similar situation in his lab where he considered excluding data from an experiment to improve the statistical significance, realizing that conflicts of interest can bias decisions in both medical and scientific contexts.

What does Dan mean by 'tattooing our faces' in a metaphorical sense?

Dan uses 'tattooing our faces' metaphorically to describe situations where people give biased advice or make decisions based on their own incentives, often without realizing how it impacts others.

Why is it difficult to recognize conflicts of interest in ourselves, according to Dan?

Dan explains that it's hard to recognize conflicts of interest in ourselves because we often believe our intentions are good and fail to see how our incentives might bias our judgment.

What was Dan’s realization about the older participant in his experiment?

Dan realized that if the older participant, who performed poorly, had been in the control group instead of the high-performance group, he might not have questioned the data at all and could have interpreted it differently.

What broader lesson does Dan draw from his experiences with both the treatment offer and his experiment?

Dan concludes that recognizing when and how we are blinded by our own incentives is crucial, and we should actively seek ways to prevent conflicts of interest from influencing our decisions.

What positive thought does Dan leave the audience with?

Dan emphasizes that by understanding how and why we make mistakes, particularly due to conflicts of interest, we can hope to fix them and improve both personal and collective outcomes.