My Research Is Pretty Boring. Thank God!
Reading Time: 3 minutesMy paper analyzing an obscure historical figure’s ideas about evil may not fascinate, but it’s solid, darn it!, The downfall of Dan Ariely: Watching this makes me so relieved my research is boring.
I don’t talk about my work at dinner parties. Unless I’m on my third glass of wine and am pretty sure the person listening to me doesn’t have a clear path to the exit. That’s because I’m an academic, and lots of the work I do is boring, or at least boring to nonacademics. Professors are often caricatured as doing research that’s a little too obscure, a little too nuanced, a little too precious. And though that’s often not the case, some part of the caricature is true.
Let me give you an example. In the paper I’m most proud of, I write about a Dust Bowl–era Black sharecropper in Alabama who is the main figure in a sprawling oral history and who talks about the Judeo-Christian notion of theodicy in ways that anticipate the arguments of late-20th-century African American theologians. See what I mean? Are you still reading?
Whether or not you are, I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of boring work as I’ve witnessed the fall of a dazzlingly unboring scholar from Duke named Dan Ariely. Ariely is a behavioral economist accused of fabricating the data sets behind the studies that made him famous. (Francesca Gino, a frequent collaborator from Harvard, stands similarly accused.) That many of those studies are about why people lie is either deliciously ironic or depressingly predictable. (It’s also one reason their downfalls have gotten so much attention. The hook is just too good!)
But what has been interesting me these days more than Ariely’s lies is the viral popularity of his research. I don’t talk about my work at dinner parties, but I always used to talk about his. So many of his papers are surprising, counterintuitive, provocative, or even a little salacious. Did you know that students who write down the Ten Commandments before taking an exam don’t cheat? That simply moving the signature box on the insurance form from the bottom to the top substantially discourages fraud? Or that masturbating men in a state of arousal can be turned on by people, animals, or shoes? That all these findings are now under scrutiny does nothing to curb just how fascinating they are to contemplate.
Ariely himself, it seems, is as interesting as his research. You can see it in a 2015 documentary about him that I’ve taught in my ethics courses for years. The film’s spine is a talk he gave at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. During the lecture, he’s not just smart. He’s magnetic and self-deprecating. He’s pithy and quick with a joke. And he plays the crowd like a fiddle.
But especially in light of his alleged fabrications, his research provocations and his studied charisma feel less like the icing on the cake and more like the whole meal. Or in simpler terms, it seems as if somewhere along the road Ariely stopped seeking knowledge and started seeking fame. He was so good at being buzzy he made that the point of his work. So successful was he at it that NBC recently turned one of his books into a whole TV show, a detective thriller called The Irrational whose main character is loosely based on Ariely himself.
But here’s the reality for academics: Strong research is very seldom sexy and will only infrequently get turned into a prime-time drama starring Jesse L. Martin. And if scholars start making the pursuit of knowledge take a back seat to the pursuit of clicks, I fear they’re going to be more likely to cut corners or massage results to keep eyeballs glued to screens big and small. (I very seldom write about my own work in the popular press, but that may have more to do with its lack of popular appeal than with my own moral probity.)
I saw this recently in a Harvard study written up in the New York Times. Public health researchers there and at Boston University (where I work) were trying to figure out if they could train social media personalities to distribute better mental health information. The study’s effective keywords—TikTok, influencers, content creators—seem as if they were picked to make the paper like- and share-worthy. The project feels like the first original work ChatGPT will produce once it gains sentience. But the results, no matter the Times’ flattering coverage, no matter how many views, show only a modest effect. Influencers exposed to better mental health content were only 3 percent more likely to share that content, and initial results suggest that number slides back toward zero over time.
So I’ve decided to re-devote myself to being a boring scholar, to doing the work I love no matter how tedious I am to talk to. I might not get shared much on Instagram, but watching Ariely’s downfall, I think maybe that’s for the best.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/ariely-gino-lies-research-harvard.html
Ref: slate
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