Human have inexplicable and “irrational behaviors” all the time (Ariely). However, is there an explanation for the reason behind those behaviors? What drives us to act immorally? Why do we rely on our intuitions so much? Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economist answers these vital questions in his TED speech. He believes that our moral code is “buggy” in terms of making decisions on something, such as cheating, lying or other actions. And sometimes a belief that drives people to make lapses in their judgement is their strong “intuitions”. To Ariely, intuition does not provide any immediate knowledge, but instead, it is just a gut feeling that sometime can lead to confusion of some facts. Dan Ariely, having experienced …show more content…
He started out with a set of math problems and given those to the students without the necessity of turning the quizzes back to Ariely. For each question people who got right, they earned money. Dan raised the temptation to cheat bit by bit, and it turned out that more and more people cheated when the money is raised. He investigated that in all of his experiments, “a lot of people cheated, but they cheated only a little bit”. Those immoral behaviors are always driven by two opposite motivations he illustrated in his speech. Firstly, as he pointed out “we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves”, and it is actually a kind of self-deception of viewing ourselves as what we want to be. Even though people cheated, they did not considered that behavior as an inconsistency with good morals. On the other hand, people all want to get benefits from cheating undoubtedly. Therefore, the best way is people just cheat a bit and can still view themselves as a nice man with integrity and honesty. Ariely called this phenomenon as a “personal fudge factor”. Because people have the intuition that they are just cheating a little bit which is not violating the moral code, they are getting comfortable to do