From Hospital Bed to Behavioral Science: Prof. Dan Ariely on Pain and Resilience

It happened when he was a high school senior. During a youth movement event, chemical substances prepared for a holiday celebration and a flare that exploded near him instantly altered the course of Dan Ariely's life.

"I was burned very, very severely," he recounts. Around 70 percent of his body sustained burns, and he spent nearly three years in hospitals. He completed his high school matriculation exams from a hospital bed, but in those days, questions about studies, a career, or the future seemed very distant.

"The questions that troubled me at first were purely questions of pain," he says. Bandages adhered to his skin, and daily treatment involved removing them, applying ointments, and re-bandaging. "How do you overcome pain? How do you think about pain? How do you prepare yourself? How can you remove bandages with less pain?"

These questions, born within the treatment rooms, years later became the foundation for his scientific research.

From Pain to the Laboratory

When Prof. Dan Ariely arrived at the university, he was introduced to the concept of scientific experimentation. For him, this was an almost personal revelation: the fact that something has been done a certain way for years does not prove it is the best way to do it.

"An experiment is like a time machine," he explains. "You say: I want to imagine a different future. Let's do it here on a small scale, try it on a few people, and see if it is better."

From there, he began researching pain. He examined, among other things, how people experience pain at varying intensities and durations, discovering that the experience does not behave intuitively. Pain that lasts longer is not necessarily experienced as severely as one might expect, while changes in pain intensity can significantly impact how it is perceived.

According to him, the direction in which pain changes also matters: pain that begins at a low intensity and builds up may be experienced differently than pain that starts intensely and subsides.

Prof. Ariely still lives with chronic pain, but notes it is vastly different from the agony he endured during hospitalization. "There is an intensity of pain you can get used to," he says, explaining that beyond a certain threshold, pain simply hijacks all attention.

Would I Have Wanted to Live?

Only after his condition improved did he begin asking himself larger existential questions.

He shares that after nearly two years of suffering, he asked himself a harsh question: Had he known on the day of the injury what he would endure in the coming years, would he have wanted to be saved?

His answer back then was negative.

Even when trying to imagine a scenario where his own children might suffer a similar injury, he arrived at the same conclusion. For many long years, he felt the suffering he experienced was so overwhelming that even the good years that followed could not necessarily "compensate" for it.

It was only around the age of 50 that something in his perspective shifted.

"I think that at age 50 I decided I had paid my debt to society," he says. Prof. Ariely speaks of his deep sense of debt toward the Israeli healthcare system, the doctors and nurses who treated him for years. At one point, he even maintained an Excel spreadsheet attempting to calculate the total cost of his medical treatment over that period.

According to his calculations, the sum exceeded three million dollars.

The Half-Bearded Transformation

His physical appearance also became part of his healing process.

Several years ago, Prof. Ariely embarked on a journey along the Israel National Trail. For a month he did not shave, and upon finishing, he discovered that a beard grew on one side of his face, while the scarred areas remained hairless.

Initially, he thought the look was bizarre. But then, reactions from others began to pour in.

A woman with a scar on her arm wrote to him that his half-bearded appearance gave her the courage to stop hiding her scar beneath long sleeves. People with various disabilities and injuries told him they, too, felt less need to hide.

"If I am helping people stop hiding, I'll keep it for now," he reflects.

Months later, he realized a transformation had also occurred within himself. For years, he felt there was "him" and there was "his injury," two separate entities locked in a struggle. The half-beard helped him view things differently.

"Suddenly I felt that it wasn't my injury and me. It was simply the story of my life."

He still receives stares on the street. Sometimes people point, sometimes children laugh. But in his view, that price is preferable to the constant effort of hiding himself.

What Do You Tell Someone Whose Life Changed Instantly?

Prof. Dan Ariely notes that following his books and open writing about his injury, individuals coping with physical trauma frequently reach out to him.

The first thing he tells them is not easy: one must understand that the person who existed before the injury has changed.

It is acceptable to mourn, to yearn for the past, but at a certain point, he stresses, it is crucial to move past life into history to make room for a new chapter.

He does not romanticize the injury as a "blessing." On the contrary, "There are many terrible things about an injury," he emphasizes. Yet alongside the hardships, he believes new possibilities can emerge.

One of those is technology, which today allows individuals with physical limitations to accomplish things that were once virtually impossible.

The second is the opportunity to re-evaluate one's life path. He compares it somewhat to a midlife crisis—not because an injury is chosen, but because it forces an individual to assess where they are, where they want to go, and what they want to do from that moment on.

He acknowledges that the injury was a decisive factor in his life's trajectory, and when asked if he would have reached where he is today without it, he answers without hesitation: "Absolutely not."

He does not claim he would have chosen to be injured. But he recognizes that the trauma shaped his areas of interest, his research, and his fundamental understanding of pain, human nature, and decision-making.

What Is Behavioral Economics?

In the second part of the interview, Prof. Ariely explains the field that made him one of the world's most renowned researchers.

Classical economics largely assumes that people make rational decisions. Behavioral economics begins from a different premise: it does not assume humanity is rational, but instead investigates what people actually do.

The result, he states, is that we are far less rational than we like to think.

People know that using a phone while driving is dangerous, yet they do it anyway. They know they should sleep more, eat better, and save money, yet they struggle to act accordingly.

His goal as a researcher is not merely to point out these flaws, but to design systems that help people make better choices.

He offers modern automobiles as an example. Car manufacturers recognize that drivers are imperfect, so they build in systems that alert, brake, and correct mistakes.

Conversely, he notes, social media platforms often do the opposite: their systems learn human weaknesses and exploit them to capture more attention.

"What I am trying to do," he concludes, "is think about how we create systems that are more like cars and less like social media."

In a sense, it is the same guiding principle that has stayed with him since his hospital days: rather than taking the way things are done for granted, one must always ask whether they can be done differently and better.