Priming is a superb way to make sure your ethics alarms are turned on and in working order. All of us go through life focused on what ethicist call “non-ethical considerations,” the human motivations, emotions, needs and desires that drive us in everything they do—love, lust, greed, ambition, fear, ego, anger, passion…wanting that promotion, the new car, the compliment, fame, power. Good people do bad things because at the moment they are unethical, they aren’t thinking about ethics. If they were, they wouldn’t engage in the misconduct, because they would be “primed” and their ethics alarms would sound in time to stop them.

I believe that the priming theory is sound, but in 2021 research showed that a data set from one of the professor’s 2012 papers was fraudulent. That study had supposedly demonstrated that people were more honest about how much mileage on their car if they had to sign a statement pledging that the number was accurate before they reported the mileage, rather than signing at the bottom of the page. No such study as described had ever been done, however, and the “data” was produced using a random number generator. An auto insurance company had reported the unsubstantiated data, and it lined up perfectly with Ariely’s theory. Confirmation bias was the result.His paper, which has been cited over 400 times by other scientists was retracted.

The study I kept citing has not been discredited, but I am now going to stop citing it, and I should have long ago. Here, for example, I caught the professor pushing a dubious proposition on NPR. In 2010 he told an interviewer a “fact” about the extent to which dentists agree on whether a tooth has a cavity (he said it was only 50% of the time). His stated source, Delta Dental insurance, denied his claim. But wait! There’s more! Another Ariely paper from 2004 was branded with a special editorial “expression of concern” because there were over a dozen statistical impossibilities in his data. These couldn’t be checked, Ariely said, because he’d lost the original data file.

Oh, but that Ten Commandments study so supports my “ethics alarms” construct! I guess I will still advocate it as a theory, but I’m not relying on Ariely’s authority.

I have been burned before with behavioral science studies and their researchers. I used social scientist Phillip Zimbardo’s 20 rules for resisting unethical influences in organizations and groups in my seminars for nearly a decade, and blogged about them here. As with some of Ariely’s writings, I have found them useful teaching tools. However, Zimbardo himself was exposed as being unethical, specifically regarding his famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which made him a national figure and launched his career in the field of analyzing culture-based misconduct. As detailed in a Medium article, his experiment was manipulated research designed by Zimbardo to reach a desired result: a lie. Worse, he has been covering up the lie for decades while still riding the wave of the fame it provided him.

Well, as far as we know, he wasn’t pals with a sex trafficker.

In 2023, I wrote here that when people tell us we should “follow the science” because scientists are experts, those people are showing us that they don’t understand science and its limitations, they don’t understand that scientists and other “experts,” are human beings and as corruptible, subject to bias, and governed by personal agendas and non-ethical considerations as the rest of us, or they are using experts and “science” as a lazy way to advocate for conclusions and policies they don’t really understand or haven’t examined objectively themselves.

I trusted Dan Ariely, and I trusted the institutions that had hired him (Duke and MIT) to have had high standards and effective vetting procedures. I trusted his best selling book, “Predictably Irrational.” The guy styled himself as an authority on right and wrong, and now I know that either he couldn’t figure out that a radiating criminal pervert like Jeffrey Epstein was a bad man, or didn’t care. Ariely and Epstein met at least seven times between 2010 and 2016. Donald Trump had figured out before then that he didn’t want anything more to do with Epstein. When your ethics alarms are less sensitive than Trump’s, I don’t want your opinions on right and wrong.

Right now, I’m trusting nobody. The problem is, and it’s a big one, is that the system of democracy relies on trust. So again I ask,

Now what?