Saturday, March 21, 2009
ok, so this excerpted from jezebel......In 2008, MIT Professor Dan Ariely got an unexpected thank-you for presenting at a conference: a Prada bag. Carrying the bag made him feel different. Special, even. So he decided to study branding and behavior.
Writes Jennifer 8. Lee for the New York Times' City Room blog,
In one of his studies, half of the 250 subjects were told that the designer glasses they were wearing were "real," while the other half were told they were wearing "counterfeits." They were told to do a number of tasks that seemed to be related to the glasses, like evaluating scenery. But tucked into the sequence was a math test. Researchers found that 60 percent of those who were wearing "counterfeit" glasses cheated, while only 20 percent of those wearing "real" glasses cheated.
Study participants also were given a financial incentive to lie about the location of circles in a series of visual puzzles — and those with the "fake" glasses lied both sooner and more often.
The Times draws the conclusion that buying counterfeit goods has a discernible corrosive effect on an individual's morality — that, in effect, wearing an item you know to be fake is like kryptonite for your sense of right and wrong. But can it really be that simple?
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