Would you steal a buck? How about a can of soda?

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/ariely-tt0409.html

by chaostheory • 18 years ago

39 24 18 years ago

web.mit.edu

Question: "Even though the value was comparable [cans of sodas and a dollar] --and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways. Why is that?"

Answer: Sane people leave six packs of sodas in refrigerators so the sodas get cold and in case those with access to the refrigerator get thirsty. The old idiom applies: treat others as you would want to be treated.

Dollar bills generally do not belong in refrigerators. Thus there is no social norm reasonably explaining the purpose of the dollars in the refrigerator. The researcher needs to provide an explanation as to why the situations are supposed to be equivalent.

boredguy8• 18 years ago

Well said. Similarly, if I found 6 dollars in a parking lot with nobody around, I'd probably pick it up. But if I found a 6 pack of soda in the parking lot, there's no way I'm picking it up, except perchance to throw it away.

chaostheory• 18 years ago

you're right - I forgot that even name brand soda bought in 12 packs or more cost much less than a dollar per can (I think it's less than 50 cents for a 12 pack in cali)

Still I feel that if they modified their experiment to have quarters instead of dollar bills (or upgraded the cans to mini-bottles while keeping the dollars), it may have had the same result

rumblerob• 18 years ago

Even if cans were worth a dollar apiece, six dollars would be worth much more than a 6-pack. Cash is considerably more liquid -- you can't walk into J.C. Penney and trade a few 6-packs for a pair of slacks.

dgabriel3• 18 years ago

That's an interesting question, but you can replicate this experiment in a variety of ways and see the same result. My mother is a nurse, and she has a saying that goes something like, "Leave a $50 bill in the break room, and nobody will touch it, but leave a plate of brownies and they're gone before you can tell people to take one."

Since it won't cost you much, try this: Leave a box of pastries or chocolates somewhere people congregate (the lunch room, a common kitchen, etc. Probably not on the street :). Count how many are left the next day. At another point, leave the cash equivalent. Count how much is missing at the end of the day.

In the vast majority of cases, the food goes (in the absence of explicit permission), but the money doesn't.

bouncingsoul3• 18 years ago

Don't plates of food carry implicit permission? One person wouldn't bring a plate full of brownies if she intended it only for herself.

And if she did she would make a note saying so.

kleevr• 18 years ago

It said the dollar bills were placed in the same randomly selected refridgerators as the six packs. If it was independant it would be weird(er), but if I saw money sitting in a fridge it would mean exactly one thing: someone is paying someone back from taking liberties with food. To me it's implicit.

So, I think the experiment was more of an experiment in mind fuckery. Imagine, coke's show up-- sweet I'll have one (assuming I didn't have a ten commandments frig-magnet). I drink a soda, and after an hour or day they're all gone. (Maybe I only drank one.)

The the next day,... oh I guess I would need to know what the timeline was on the experiment... but say I take that leap to finish (I give it under 10% that this happened in the same weak though.) I, having only drank one soda, know someone else might've drank five. And perhaps, they, the 'other(s)' felt guilty when no more cokes showed up.

Basically I wouldn't touch some one's reparations, unless I knew it was me. And with my partial guilt, I wouldn't touch that sin money... I might throw in a buck.

GavinB• 18 years ago

You're correct in that the dollars are out of place while the soda cans are not.

A better experiment might be this: Leave the door to a locker open, with a few items of clothing to show that it belongs to someone. In one version leave an open jar of candy. In the other, an open jar of quarters.

I suspect that some of the candy would disappear while far fewer of the quarters would go.

Of course, the reason for that is that the candy is much more tempting than the quarters, though less that 25 cents per piece.

petercooper• 18 years ago

I disagree, but only because I believe people would consider candy that's /already opened/ by someone else to be "tainted" in some way.

bouncingsoul3• 18 years ago

But then he tried another variation: Before doing the test, he asked one group of subjects to name 10 books they had read in high school. He asked another group to name as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. The group that listed the books followed the same pattern as the earlier test – they all cheated a little. But the group that named the commandments was different: Nobody cheated at all!

"Just the act of contemplating morality eliminated cheating," Ariely explains.

This conclusion seems like one someone wanted to make, not one that makes sense.

Couldn't it just be that people know the ten commandments are easily checked, so it's silly to try to make some up?

And I don't understand how they know people cheated on the books question. How can you possibly find out what books someone read while in high school? Unless they mean specifically which ones were assigned (which still seems hard to verify).

And if people listed some titles they hadn't read it doesn't imply cheating: they could simply be remembering incorrectly.

warwick• 18 years ago

I found that section confusing too. I think it's just the result of a bit of bad writing though. After rereading it, I'd guess they had subjects list books or commandments and then take the addition test.

bouncingsoul3• 18 years ago

I think you're right.

zealog• 18 years ago

I've read about this bit of the book in other articles. The cheating was not on the books/10 commandments, it was on a math quiz (that afforded cheating) which followed the listing.

For those that listed books, some would cheat on the next bit. For those that listed commandments, they wouldn't.

bprater• 18 years ago

I bought the book this week. It's a juicy compelling read if you are interested in psychology and marketing.

thingsilearned• 18 years ago

I just finished and recommend a very interesting book on this kind of thing. It's called

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. By Robert B. Cialdini

aneesh• 18 years ago

The values are not always equivalent. When you're really thirsty, a can of soda is worth more than a buck.

ChaitanyaSai• 18 years ago

Dan Ariely, the researcher behind this, has done a lot of seriously cool work on human behavior (People call it behavioral economics, which makes it sound rather academic or wonkish). http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/chapters.shtml

This somewhat personal essay is worth reading for many reasons: http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/mypain.pdf

bkow20• 18 years ago

What would you do if you found 280 bucks in a stack of 20's on the sidewalk?

This actually happened to me on campus a couple years ago. Not knowing what to do, I picked up the bills and just stood there awkwardly, holding them out, hoping the person who dropped them would come back and claim them (under the assumption that a random person wouldn't say anything to me holding 14 20's). I skipped class waiting, and then, not wanting to miss the next class pocketed the money. Was I wrong?

antiform• 18 years ago

I think a small vignette from Clerks says it best:

Dante Hicks: "Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they're being watched."

Veronica: "Honesty through paranoia."

Would you steal a buck? How about a can of soda?

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