Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign.
B (0:06)
Welcome back to Uncensored cmo and one of the topics that truly fascinates me is behavioural science and how we can use it in a marketing context. One of the world's experts, Dan Ariely, author of many, many books, really knows his stuff, if you've read it. Predictably Irrational is one of the most game changing books on behavioral science. He's also written a book more recently called Misbelief about how social media and conspiracy theories take hold and the impact it has and what you can do about it. Dan is a fascinating guy. We have a conversation that covers so many different topics. He is really interesting and he brings such practical wisdom from behavioral science and how we can use it to be better marketers. Here it is ladies and gentlemen. We are here on Uncensored CMO and I'm meeting professor Dan Ariely. Dan, welcome to the show.
A (0:49)
Lovely to be here.
B (0:50)
Now anyone watching this on video might notice that you're sporting half a beard.
A (0:55)
I am.
B (0:55)
I'm having a guess. There's a story behind the beard.
A (0:59)
There is a story behind. Actually there's a story that is a combination of some things about me and some things about social science. So it's a, it's a good story. But how does it look to you? You know, it's been a while since I asked anybody like you look, I mean you've seen me in a couple of videos but it's the first time you we meet face to face. How does it look to you?
B (1:19)
I think you do, you do it very well. It's super smooth on one side and it's a full on beard on the other. It's got some asymmetry to it. You put it off. Well, do people get see you from one side and they, they. And then they see from another side and they think you're someone else.
A (1:33)
Yeah, but how odd does it look to you?
B (1:36)
It's actually less odd now I've met you.
A (1:38)
Okay.
B (1:38)
Whereas online I was like oh, what's that? Is it, is it some trick? Is it sort of. I was it to get noticed, you know.
A (1:46)
Okay, so what's the story of this hafibield? So. So this half a beard has a few reasons. The first one is that many years ago I was badly burned. Most of my body is covered with scars. My hands, most of my body. And the scars have a few features to them. It's a tougher skin, it's not flexible, there's no sweat glands. There's also no hair. So this side of my face is all burns. So hair just doesn't grow on this side. And it just so happened that my burn was almost symmetrical. If you look close by, it's not exactly, but you know, that's the just the shape of the burn. So that's reason one. But of course I could shave and if I shaved they would look less odd, it will be less strikingly strange. And for many years I shaved. And then a few years ago I went on a month long hike. I was a serious, I am still a workaholic. But at some point I said when I was a kid I used to hike. I haven't hiked in many, many years. Let me go back and try and hike and I'll take a month to do it. So I did a month long hike which was fantastic. And at the end of this month long hike I looked sort of like this. A little bit less white, a little bit more hair. And I looked in the mirror for the first time and it looked very strange to me. Like I really didn't like it. I can only imagine what it feels like to other people who look at me because it felt very strange to me. I look at my face, I couldn't recognize it, I couldn't see the point. And I was going to go back to shaving, but I thought that I would keep the hafibield for a while. I said, you know, I took me a month to grow it, I'm going to shave it, I will never do it again. So let me give it a few more weeks for this happy bird. And to my surprise I started getting things from people about this affability. Now what, what were the things for? These were people who told me that they had their own injury and they were always trying to hide their injury. For example, there was a woman who actually left me a note in my mailbox. She worked at a youth center not too far from me. She said that she was also burned and she has always wore long sleeve shirts to cover her burns. There was another woman in her 50s who told me that she had a car accident when she was 17 and she didn't wear a skirt or a dress since. And she's going to start. So you know, these people thought I was doing it on purpose, right? Here I am, I don't care about my injury. I'm going to not hide my asymmetry. And I didn't correct him. I didn't say it was a mistake. But I decided to keep. And they have a beard for a while longer is like a public service announcement. You Know, there's a. It's tough to be injured. It's tough to be different. And I thought, if I can help people be a little bit less bashful about this, this would be a good. A good step. But the really surprising thing, and this is where social science comes to play, happened about four months down the line. So I'm four months into this half a beard adventure, and all of a sudden I realized that I feel differently about my own. My own injury. You know, for. For many years, I felt like the. The man in the Iron mask. Remember that story? I felt I was trapped in these scar tissue. The scar tissue is. Is tough. It limits movements. It's difficult to regulate temperature. It has all kinds of things in it. And I felt like inside there was the same Dan before I got injured, but I was kind of wrapped in this rapper that was aggressive. Actually, you know, this car's shrink. I mean, it's an issue. And all of a sudden I felt less antagonistic. I felt it was not me and the injury kind of fighting, like, who is the real me. But I felt this is just part of the story of my life. And I started kind of with a very much different level of sexual acceptance. Self acceptance, including sexual acceptance. Yeah. You know, getting. Getting undressed romantically with. With scars is a challenge. And. And anyway, I. Everything improved. Everything improved all of a sudden. And I thought to myself, what happened? Why, why now? And what I realized is that these people who said they were stopping hiding is also what I was doing. So imagine somebody like me half shaving. I wake up in the morning, smooth on one side, stubble on the other side. And in the act of half shaving is also the act of hiding. You know, I would be more non symmetrical before shaving. I would be less non symmetrical after shaving. And I actually remember that I was. I was shaving to be less noticed. Right. Like, people would notice the scars less and so on. And letting go of that was incredibly healthy. Now, this is also what brings me to what I think social science is about. I think social science is about discovering these versions of half beards. Right. What are the things that we're doing? For good reason. Right. I thought that being less noticed would be a good. A good idea. It ended up being a bad idea. But social science is supposed to help us discover those things. Here are the things that we think are good for us, but in fact they are not. And here are the things that we should be doing. And it's very hard to discover by ourselves. Because if you asked me if you asked me 10 years ago, how would it feel like to be with the half a beard, I would have fantastic intuition about day one. Day one will be terrible. People would ask questions, kids would laugh and so on. But if you ask me and what would be the adaptation process over four months and what would other changes would it create? I wouldn't be able to predict. So anyway, so that's what I think social science is about, is finding these little tricks of how we really function and get us to adopt them in a better way.
