A one-on-one Torah study with Dan Ariely. In this session, he shares pieces of his Jewish journey and applies his research findings about dishonesty and ethics to a Talmudic tale about harlotry and ritual fringes (tzitzit). He sees in this text a teaching about how rituals and intentional engagement with religious items, rather than habits, can help us become the people we want to be.

Source sheet here: www.sefaria.org/sheets/316168

Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is the author of the bestsellers Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, Dollars and Sense and Amazing Decisions -- as well as the TED Book Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes Our Motivations. He is also co-creator of the film documentary (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies. Through his research and his (often amusing and unorthodox) experiments, he questions the forces that influence human behavior and the irrational ways in which we often all behave.

Sefaria Talks Torah with Psychologist and Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely

We are the People of the Book. For thousands of years, our culture, our traditions, and our values have been transmitted through our texts. From an oral tradition to handwritten scrolls to a vast corpus of printed books, each new medium democratized knowledge, and brought more people into the great Jewish conversation. We are the generation charged with shepherding our texts from print to digital in a way that can expand their reach and impact in new and unprecedented ways.

Sefaria is a non-profit organization dedicated to building the future of Jewish learning in an open and participatory way. We are assembling a free living library of Jewish texts and their interconnections, in Hebrew and in translation. With these digital texts, we can create new, interactive interfaces for Web, tablet and mobile, allowing more people to engage with the textual treasures of our tradition.