“What is it in your experience that is real” (Ariely). Dan Ariely is a Psychology and Behavioral Economics professor at Duke University. While he was originally a mathematics and physics major, his interests switched to psychology; Ariely now has a Ph. D in cognitive psychology. Before teaching at Duke, he taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for almost ten years. Ariely has several psychology related talks on TED and has been watched almost 8 million times.
In Ariely’s TED talk “How equal do we want the world to be? You’d be surprised” he emphasizes that rather than focusing on real inequalities, one should focus on what to strive for and how to achieve equality and fairness in America. This concept (or the lack of) is depicted in “12 Angry Men,” a 1954 drama, where a jury is divided by their opinions and many of the jurors are heavily biased based on their real life experiences. For example, one juror is an executioner, which causes him to be heavily biased against the evidence, and although there is abundance of it, he still believes that the child is guilty. Ariely believes this is wrong and refutes it by showing knowledge gaps and more importantly desirability gaps in his statistics from the study.
I agree with Ariely’s conclusion that the desire for something is more important than the current situation because if one doesn’t take the initiative to change, the situation will never get better. In this case, if Americans don’t strive towards equality, they will never achieve it.