It was not every day that Jeffrey Epstein got an email like the one he received from Dan Ariely, a behavioral researcher at Duke University, in March of 2011.
“After we met for the first time,” Dr. Ariely wrote Mr. Epstein, “I started wondering what makes people forgive others. So I asked about 500 people how likely they are to forgive, befriend, hire people who were accused of different crimes.”
This was less than two years after Mr. Epstein’s release from prison on charges of solicitation and soliciting sex from a minor, and Dr. Ariely wanted to share his findings. “Crimes related to sex do worse than anything else (even murder),” he reported. “I realize that this is not good news for you, and I have no intentions to offend, but I am sending it to you in case you are interested.”
Among the dozens of prominent people featured in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice last month, Dr. Ariely stands out in at least one respect: While others often avert their eyes, rarely acknowledging Mr. Epstein’s transgressions unless they are involved in efforts to rehabilitate his image, Dr. Ariely fixes his gaze where it would naturally drift.
In several email exchanges between 2009 and 2019, Dr. Ariely alludes to or invokes Mr. Epstein’s ethical lapses, often unbidden. He asks if Mr. Epstein can introduce him to Bernie Madoff, the convicted Ponzi schemer, and attempts to enlist Mr. Epstein in research on moral boundaries and decision-making. He tries to broker a meeting between Mr. Epstein and a former chief executive caught up in another salacious controversy — so that “maybe you could help him think about life after a scandal.”
Over the past few decades, Dr. Ariely has built a worldwide reputation on his understanding of the human mind, including its capacity for lying, cheating and other dodgy behavior. He has often illustrated his research with stories of real-life degeneracy — cheating spouses, shady salespeople, corrupt executives. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Mr. Epstein struck him as a tantalizing source of psychological insights.
“At the time of our meetings, I was deep into research on dishonesty and crime, and I spoke with many individuals who had broken the law,” Dr. Ariely said in a statement. He added that ideas from conversations with these people and Mr. Epstein had found their way into a book and documentary about dishonesty.
And yet there is little evidence in the files that Mr. Epstein provided introductions that might advance Dr. Ariely’s research, or the sorts of offbeat anecdotes that might fill out his best-selling books and punctuate his TED talks.
What the correspondence does show is that the tone between the men became friendlier over time. Dr. Ariely appeared to hit up Mr. Epstein to invest in a consulting venture and to provide funds for a documentary. He asked Mr. Epstein to help him contact a “very very smart” woman he had met at a conference and thanked him for arranging a tour during a vacation.
Several of the emails come off as warm and familiar. “See who I had dinner with,” Dr. Ariely emailed Mr. Epstein in 2017, apparently referring to a mutual acquaintance. “Great give him a hug,” Mr. Epstein responded. (Dr. Ariely said in his statement to The New York Times that “our relationship wasn’t a friendship, and he didn’t financially support any of my projects.”)
All of which complicates the narrative posed by Dr. Ariely and some of his fellow Epstein correspondents. However high-minded their reasons for forging ties — research, philanthropy — at some point their relationships seemed to stray into more complicated terrain.
‘My Research on Dishonesty’
Dr. Ariely has acknowledged an initial encounter with Mr. Epstein that “was not documented in the files.” He told the Duke campus newspaper, which reported on his emails earlier, that the meeting was to seek funding for his lab not long after he arrived at the university. In his statement, Dr. Ariely said that they had met on three other occasions, one of which was a “chance encounter at a conference,” and that “Epstein led me to believe he had been rehabilitated and had turned away from criminal behavior.”
But the Epstein files indicate that the two men had at least three more in-person encounters than were disclosed by Dr. Ariely, who said it was possible that some of the meetings fell through at the last minute or “that a meeting slipped my memory.” They also wrote dozens of emails to each other over the years.
A Duke spokesperson said the university was “carefully evaluating” the information released by the Justice Department on Jan. 30. The university announced in early February that it was shuttering Dr. Ariely’s research center along with two others as part of a “strategic realignment” begun last spring.
One of the earliest emails mentioning Dr. Ariely was between Mr. Epstein and an associate, who had communicated with Dr. Ariely about a symposium Mr. Epstein was helping to plan. The correspondence took place while Mr. Epstein was serving his prison sentence, and the event does not appear to have happened.
Dr. Ariely then visited Mr. Epstein’s house in New York in November 2010. On the day of the meeting, Mr. Epstein invited someone else, whose name is redacted in the files, to sit in. “I have an interesting scientist coming at 5, would you like to stay and listen?” he wrote, referring to Dr. Ariely. “If so come at 430 so that we can spend alone time than join him.”
Afterward, Dr. Ariely sent an email to Mr. Epstein with the subject line “Thanks for yesterday,” writing, “You certainly lead and interesting life and it is always challenging to get your perspective.”
Over the next year, Dr. Ariely cultivated Mr. Epstein not so much as a rich and powerful patron any academic researcher might welcome, but as a source for intelligence about the ethically impaired.
He emailed Mr. Epstein in January 2011 to ask for the introduction to Mr. Madoff — “I’m very interested in talking to him, relating to my research on dishonesty.”
He emailed Mr. Epstein again in March with his findings about forgiveness for people accused of sex offenses and other crimes. “If you want to talk about where to take this research or other questions,” he signed off, “let me know.”
In the fall, he emailed to say he was conducting research on “how our perception of moral boundaries affect decision-making.” He asked if Mr. Epstein “would be willing to chat with me about that in the realm of banking or if you know of anybody who would be good for me to chat with.”
‘What Adventure Would You Recommend?’
Dr. Ariely has attracted a large popular audience for his work over the years, including his 2008 best seller, “Predictably Irrational.” In one famous study, he and two co-authors found that participants were less likely to cheat on a math test if they were asked to write down the Ten Commandments beforehand.
Such eye-catching findings have brought Dr. Ariely some grief over the years. Scholars have struggled to replicate the Ten Commandments study, and in 2021 a journal retracted another prominent paper on which Dr. Ariely was a co-author because of evidence that it relied on fabricated data. Dr. Ariely has denied being the source of the fraud.
Regardless, it was Dr. Ariely’s celebrity rather than his scholarly rigor that appeared to be the selling point for Mr. Epstein, who made a sport of collecting star academics.
When a prominent mathematician emailed in 2017 to ask if he knew Dr. Ariely, Mr. Epstein humble-bragged: “just received an email from him ten minutes ago. why?” The mathematician responded: “I discovered him last night on TED, brilliant.” Mr. Epstein promptly connected the two.
Dr. Ariely initially favored the polite tone of the supplicant. “If I get there early should I come in or wait?” he asked Mr. Epstein’s assistant on the way to a meeting in 2012. Mr. Epstein apparently liked to let him bide his time. “Dan ariely is here waiting un requited,” he boasted to a correspondent in 2013. To which the person replied, “BEYOND.”
As late as 2015, Dr. Ariely pressed Mr. Epstein for contacts that could advance his research. “I want to try and interview a few creative CEOs about what they think works and doesn’t work for motivating employees,” he emailed. “Do you have some people that you think would be extra good for that?”
But as with other such requests, there is no record in the files that Mr. Epstein responded. In any case, Dr. Ariely’s interests in the rich man were already shifting in other directions. He approached Mr. Epstein to help finance a film in 2014 and appeared to pitch him on investing in a project advising tech start-ups the same year.
In at least one case, he appeared to lean on Mr. Epstein as a go-between with a woman, asking if Mr. Epstein could “send me the name and email of the redhead that was here with you.” (Dr. Ariely has said that he found the woman intellectually interesting and cited her hair color “solely to help identify who I meant” and that he doesn’t recall meeting her again.)
And he seemed to grow comfortable asking for personal favors. In late 2015, he emailed Mr. Epstein introducing him to Noel Biderman, the former chief executive of the company operating Ashley Madison, a website that helped people engage in extramarital affairs. A few years earlier, Mr. Biderman’s company had begun sharing internal Ashley Madison data with Dr. Ariely for his research on dishonesty. But after an unrelated data breach exposed millions of Ashley Madison users, Mr. Biderman stepped down.
Dr. Ariely thought the fallen executive might benefit from Mr. Epstein’s wisdom. “I want to introduce you to Noel Biderman who was the CEO of www.ashleymadison.com and is now experiencing some of the downsides of their scandal,” he wrote. “I was hoping that when Noel is next in NY that the two of you could meet.” Mr. Epstein responded approvingly, though it’s unclear if the two men ever met. (Mr. Biderman did not respond to requests for comment.)
By 2017, Dr. Ariely was casually asking Mr. Epstein for travel advice. “This year in March I want to try a few different adventures” he wrote one morning in December. As examples, Dr. Ariely threw out the possibility of touring a Ferrari factory and driving a new model, or visiting a particle accelerator. “What adventure would you recommend?” he asked Mr. Epstein.
When Mr. Epstein responded to say he had arranged a private tour of a Ferrari factory, “at your date of choice,” Dr. Ariely was thrilled. “Seriously? This is just amazing,” he wrote.
“We had a great visit,” he emailed after the tour. “They did not let us drive but they showed us the factory and how they make the cars.” (Dr. Ariely said in a statement that “eventually a fellow scientist at Ferrari organized a much better tour for me at their factory. I did not want to share this with Epstein, so I politely thanked him.” Emails between Mr. Epstein and an Italian business contact, however, show him arranging Dr. Ariely’s visit to Ferrari.)
The next year, Mr. Epstein’s legal problems began to mount. His light jail sentence for sex crimes had attracted public scrutiny because of an investigation by The Miami Herald, and other news outlets were raising questions. In March 2019, Mr. Epstein sent Dr. Ariely a link to a letter from his lawyers pushing back on a Times editorial criticizing his plea deal.
“Sorry about this,” Dr. Ariely wrote in response. Then he added: “How are you in general? I am mostly very good with some fun new adventures.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, downward mobility and discrimination. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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