Duke Behavioral Economist: Why You’ll Regret the Risks You Don’t Take | Dan Ariely - EP 811
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles interviews behavioral economist Dan Ariely about the counterintuitive nature of regret in life decisions. Ariely
Key takeaways
- In the short term, people regret actions they take; over time, they regret not taking risks.
- The most meaningful life achievements are often accompanied by frustration, effort, and tears—not momentary joy.
Main topics
- Regret and risk-taking over time
- The role of passion in human well-being
Notable quotes
"In the short term, we regret the things that we did. But when you look at it from the perspective of time, you're upset with the risks you didn't take."
Conclusion
The episode concludes with a powerful reminder: the risks we don't take can shape our lives just
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) What if the things you regret today aren't the things you'll regret most when you look back at your life? When I sat down with behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, we talked about why we tend to regret the risks we take in the moment, but often regret the risks we didn't take when we look back years later. And then he shared what his research is finding about where we're playing it safest. Take a listen to this. In Speaker 2 (0:25) the short term, we regret the things that we did. But when you look at it from the perspective of time, you're upset with the risks you didn't take. The biggest gap I find, the area of life that they don't take enough risk, romantic love. And people basically say, not willing to be vulnerable. It's your friend, John, and welcome to Speaker 3 (0:47) PassionStruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, Thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 3 (1:25) Welcome back to Passion Struck episode 811. And today we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Brain, how your mind learns, changes, and heals. Last week, we looked at change from three very different perspectives. Mark Manson challenged us to move beyond insight and actually change our behavior. Dr. David Perlmutter showed us how the biological environment we create can influence the health of our brains. And actor Josh Dumoul gave us a very personal look. and how the environments we choose can shape the person we become. And today we're turning to something that sits beneath all of those conversations. How do we make better choices? Because we can know what matters. We can know what we should do. We can even know what kind of person we want to become. And still, our brains have a remarkable ability to steer us in another direction. That's what makes today's conversation with Dr. Dan Ariely so fascinating. Dan is a behavioral economist, professor, and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational. For decades, he's studied the strange gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do and why we're often far less rational than we think. But one part of our conversation really stayed with me. Dan has been studying how we think about risk, and his research suggests something counterintuitive. In the moment, we tend to regret the risk we take. But when we look back at our lives, we often regret. the risks we didn't take. And that raises a much bigger question. Where in your life are you playing it safer than you really want to? We also talk about risk, relationships, work, education, bureaucracy, technology, and even what happens when we become so focused on efficiency that we lose sight of what makes life meaningful itself. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Dan Ariely. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled today to have Dan Ariely on PassionStruck. Dan, how Speaker 2 (3:37) are you today? Speaker 3 (3:38) I Speaker 2 (3:38) am lovely. I am lovely. First of all, it's a very nice name for a podcast, but I should say that I was thinking about passion since you wrote me. What element of motivation you chose to capture. There's lots of motivations. And I think it's one of the most interesting ones. It's the top of all motivations. It's something that is driven by passion. You can imagine, I want to be professional. You can imagine, I want to do things well. I want to improve. I want to accomplish. There's lots of motivations. Lots of words describe lots of elements of motivation. Passion is the highest order. When we get to that one, we've achieved a lot. Speaker 3 (4:26) Thank you for saying that. When I started this journey years ago, the term passion struck wasn't in my vocabulary at all. I happened to be having a conversation with a mentor and he made this statement to me that it goes, John, it seems like what you're describing is people go from being stuck to becoming passion struck. And I did what anyone would do after he said it, it clicked and I went to Google. To see if anyone owned the domain and there it was on GoDaddy and the rest is history. Very nice. Dan, when I look at your entire body of work, and I have been a fan for a long time, you go from predictably irrational to misbelief to your recent work on social connection. And to me, it feels like you've been studying the same question from different angles. Why do human beings repeatedly move away from the things that would actually make life better? Is that kind of a fair characterization? It's fair, but let me explain it a little bit. Speaker 2 (5:27) I think that I started by working on why people do things that are irrational. And very quickly I learned that irrational is not always not in our self-interest. So I started by thinking about the narrower definition of irrationality. Why are people influenced by irrelevant options? Why are we attracted to zero? All kinds of things that are clearly not in our best interest. But later on, I moved into describing things that don't make sense for our well-being, irrelevant of whether they are rational or irrational. And if we think about passion for a second, passion is an irrational term. If you wrote a model, often the rational person will go to work to get money to do something else, sit on the beer, drinking beer or something. The model is not, the standard model of labor is not a model that we enjoy labor. Labor is negative. Speaker 2 (6:37) And we do it to get money so that we can do other things. And passion, if we say it as a high order thing, is a very irrational term. But I move to embracing those things as part of humanity and saying, okay, so let's look at what makes us human. And what makes us human is running marathons, which is not enjoyable, and climbing mountains, and writing poetry. Speaker 2 (7:06) doing startup and if you my challenge usually to people is to say think about the most important three things you have made done in your life write them down and now write next to each of them how many years months weeks days and minutes they were accompanied by joy versus by tears frustrations and so Speaker 1 (7:33) And people end up saying Speaker 2 (7:34) the things that we are the most proud of are not the things that make the most momentary happiness. Speaker 1 (7:42) Like this book I wrote did Speaker 2 (7:45) not result in years of laughter. It was frustrating and difficult. And I Speaker 1 (7:51) think that Speaker 2 (7:51) even though it's irrational, it's part of humanity. So going back to your question, I think that my role is to find out what are the things that we do. that is actually in our long-term well-being and what are the things we do that are not in our long-term well-being and how do we do less of the ones that don't serve us and more of the one that serve us because if you look at passion you can say hey People are doing this irrational thing. People go to work and they love what they're doing and they spend extra time and they research at home and they talk about work with their friends. It's irrational. Let's stop it. No, I think it's one of those things that it's irrational, but in a good way, in a way that makes us human. We have a capacity. to be kind, and we have a capacity to be generous, and we have a capacity to love, and we have the capacity to care, and we have the capacity to be passionate. Let's not turn it off. Let's recognize how important it is, and let's figure out how do we stop the things that we created in society that turn it off, and how do we increase the things that turn it on. And by the way, with passion, or all the words that create extreme motivation, We have sadly created lots of things that turns it off. Speaker 3 (9:18) Yes, we certainly have. And those things that are turning it off only seem to be growing. Speaker 2 (9:23) I'll continue. Stop me if you know what you want to talk about. But I started looking during COVID and a little bit after COVID at bureaucratic burden. And COVID was an interesting time because lots of companies moved to lots of things online. Speaker 2 (9:43) And online meant procedures. And it meant doing things without other people and doing it in a self-service way. And procedures are designed for some average case. They're not designed to cover all cases. So I'll give you an example. For me, I work at Duke University. Pre-COVID, the people from HR sat not too far from our office. They would sometimes come for coffee. We would somehow have receptions. They'd talk about research or something, and they would come. And we knew each other. And when I needed to solve something, like I had somebody in my lab. from South America and their visa was delayed or something was happening, I would knock on their door and say, hey, we have a problem. And they would say, okay, let's see what we do. During COVID, and I'm telling you this specific example, but it's a representation of lots of things. During COVID, they worked from home. We worked from home. They never came back after COVID. They stayed working from home. And everything moved online. And now when there's somebody with a visa problem, there's a form. And there's nobody to say, oh, I think we should, we could do this or we could do this, or we could be flexible here or we could push this here. And as a consequence, and I'll use the visa example, I have many others, but as a consequence, I had people who their visas ran out. Speaker 1 (11:19) We couldn't do anything. And now Speaker 2 (11:22) we have an employee that we pay salary for. that we promised them working condition and salary, but also a visa because they couldn't work without a visa. And now we don't give them visa. And we're saying it's not our fault. There was a process. It didn't fit the process. This is what happens when it doesn't fit the process. How motivated is that person now to go above and beyond? Speaker 2 (11:51) And especially when people work in other countries, there are often cases that break the standard mold of employment. Sometimes you need to be on a call very early in the morning, very late at night. What's weekend for us might not be weekend for them. Things change. How likely is somebody going to say, you know what? It's Friday night or Saturday morning or 5 a.m., but we are connected to the mission. And it ends up that bureaucracy ends up killing people's motivation. I think we have an inner need. to feel connected to our job and to be passionate about it and to want it. And often, not only we don't fuel and satisfy that need, we do the opposite. I was in a history archaeological museum a couple of months ago, and I had a tour and I got to see all the labs. And first of all, the people there were amazing. There was one guy who was working, I think, most of the day to remove... a speck of rust from an old coin. He didn't want to use chemicals. He wanted to remove it perfectly and to stay with the best specimen after that possible. But I asked him, I said, look, you're talking with very ancient artifacts. Speaker 1 (13:20) Let's