Dan Ariely on Marriage

hi my name is Dan Ariely I'm a professor of psychology and behavioral economics and the author of two books on these topics called predictably irrational and the upside of the rationality and there's a recent book called spouse anomic and Paul Schumann in a Jenny Anderson the authors of this interesting book asked me to make some comments about my own married life so I've been married for twelve and a half years actually the reason I remember it's 12 years is because my last anniversary I got to me a dozen eggs I asked myself what do you get for anniversary for 12 years and the answer of course was a dozen eggs actually these were wooden eggs and I wrote a little word on each of them and together they made a nice sentence so it wasn't as as bad so anyway they gave me five questions that they wanted me to answer about dating and relationship but before I answer this let me just get a dress properly okay so I think that now we're ready to talk about romance and dating so the first question is is getting married a rational thing to do that's of course very hard to say because depends on who you get married to but I will say two things about it one it turns out it's a better deal for men than women in general men increase their happiness more when they get married and women not not as much partially because in society women take more of the brunt of married life and get less less of the benefit so that's so that's one one thing the second thing it's interesting about marriage is that marriage is about the long term relationship but most people of course make decisions about getting married by short-term infatuations and because of that we see of course lots of divorce rate because when we think about marriage we often think about what's good for us in the short term and we assume that what's good for us today shorter would also be good for the long term but the nature of relationship is not like that infatuation dies at some point something else hopefully comes instead of it and that's the question of transitioning from short-term relationship to long-term relationship the second question is that spouses argue it's the just natural thing to happen and is there a better and worse way to to argue so here's the thing people argue about lots of stuff and often the argument is about other things people just feel the need to argue and there's some good advantages to arguing by the way lots of people report that makeup sex is a wonderful thing and to do so there's not the sum and benefit for four arguments the thing about arguments though is that they can easily escalate beyond what we intend them to be as people get in a bad mood in an angry mood they start saying things that they wish they would have said later on and what happened is there's escalation so I think arguing is healthy and beneficial and useful and the issue is really how not to get it in to spiral out of control or how not to say things we would regret how not to leave the house do do other things that would have very dramatic consequences so that's that's the issue and the third question asked me is about the question of keeping doors open people are often interested in many people attracted to many people especially in the dating process you can imagine yourself dating multiple people and the question is how do we a decide to commit to one to one person in the experiments we have done what we show is that if you can date three people and they all promise you they can stay viable and you can keep on dating them you very quickly pick one and just stick to that person but if you date three people and two of them threaten you that unless you go and continue dating then they will go away and find somebody else we keep on revisiting those options we have a very hard time too closing doors and I think that weddings are basically that function you know I actually didn't believe that the wedding would make a big difference in how I feel towards to me but it did and I think the moment you made such a big large public commitment it does make a difference you you virtually closed all other doors and you commit to a relationship it actually does make make things better so we have this tendency to be vastly interested I think commitment is actually a good way to define ourselves and basically commit to one one direction and what does economics taught me about marriage and what has marriage taught me about the comics I think economics has taught me very little about marriage you know in standard economics and marriage is really a production facility it's about economies of scale people living together gets better at tax returns and distributing jobs between them and I think that describes very little of married life I describe some of it but very little and what Mary have described about economics is that the economics is not a good description of human life the fact is that marriage is really not rational to think about lots of stuff that we do in relationship it's a vast description to think about them in rational style of economics so having kids being married that I think are all examples of the fact that rational economics is not what's ruling our life and the last question was where the speed-dating is a good idea I actually love speed-dating and the reason I love speed-dating is that when you go on online dating the chances that somebody would actually return your email you'll have the meeting is actually quite quite low well in speed dating people come there's a limited set of people that you're going to see and people in advanced basic decided they're going to say yes to some people so the odds even for somebody like me is at the end of the day you will meet somebody they will be willing to go with you on a date they all just seems to be a much better the small set people say yes to some of them the odds are getting are getting much much higher for a second date I will say one last thing about speed-dating a while ago we did some speed dating events for older individuals this was not for romantic purposes but it was for finding friends and maybe going for walks and so on and the initial speed adding events didn't work so well but what happened is that soon after we asked people to bring something to the speed-dating event that was important in their lives and used that as a catalyst for the discussion and that was actually a fantastic success we couldn't stop people from having those discussions so basically and hope this is useful some reflection on spouse Atomics take care

Channel: Spousonomics

Views: 94,955

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Keywords: Dan4Spousonomics, Spousonomics

Id: BLRbwjPJvis

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 09 2011