And here’s another post I meant to write up from last year! Dan Ariely also came with us to the 2008 festival. Dan, along with his co-authors, won the 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine. (And his book, Predictably Irrational, is a wonderful read.)

So we were at one of the parties that local folks throw for the visiting speakers and their own friends, and I mentioned to Dan, as I did here, that I tend to feel inferior to European women in terms of style. Dan suggested that this was merely the placebo effect in action: that because I knew they were European, I attributed greater panache to them than might be objectively determined. (Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize winner Brian Wansink has shown that people rate a “fine California wine” higher than a “fine Nebraska wine,” despite nothing changing but the label.) “What would you think of that woman’s dress if you saw it in America?” he asked.

Now this was a move of some rhetorical cleverness. It flattered or reassured the other person (i.e., me), invoked the awesome explanatory power of the speaker’s research, and gave the conversation somewhere to go afterward. Quite the hat trick. We can’t always speak as productively as Behavioral-Economist Dan, or listen as productively as Sword-Swallower Dan, but it’s something to aim for.

(Since it is the name of his book, I’m tempted to refer to Dan Ariely as “Predictably Irrational Dan,” but that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish him from Sword-Swallower Dan, as what could be more predictably irrational than a person who swallows a sword whenever someone asks them to? So “Behavioral-Economist Dan” it will have to be.)