Would you steal a buck? How about a can of soda? | Hacker News Reader

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

web.mit.edu

39 pointschaostheory24 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ok, here's another example. Only a few people I know, a small handful, have had roommates take money from them. However, virtually everyone I know has had a roommate take food from them (or has taken food from a roommate) without permission.

But the problem is still the same. The statement that "people have an irrational sense of logic because they would take food from a roommate, but not money" is still incorrect.

Of the 15 or so roommates I've had in my life, 13 or 14 would have almost always answered "yes" to the question "hey, can I take XXX from the fridge and eat it." Whereas fewer of them would have answered the same if I had asked for money. Therefore, the decision to take something from another person is heavily influenced by the anticipated response of that person (and therefore not as illogical as the researcher is concluding).

Would your roommates refuse to lend you 5 dollars? If not, why is it wrong to take the 5 dollars from his desk, or take money he left in a common area? Under your reasoning it would perfectly fine, common, even.

"I'm sure he won't mind if I just take a few dollars," seems more wrong than "I'm sure he won't mind if I drink one of his fancy beers/soymilk smoothies/etc".

I think you're missing my point. Yes, it seems more wrong to take money than to take a drink from the fridge.

The researcher in this study is saying "aha! taking a drink is exactly the same as taking money, therefore human beings are illogical thinkers in this scenario!" But it is in fact logical - it's based on the anticipated response of the person whose money/drink you're taking (and if you don't know how it belongs to - the general expectations of people in your society/community).

Also, I'm sure that there are societies in which people never take drinks from other people, and consider it the same as taking money. A comprehensive study would have covered more than an American college campus.

No, I don't think that is what he is saying at all. He is saying that standard economics treats the two as being the same, because it reduces things to their dollar value. The experiment identifies an area where standard economic assumptions breakdown, which means that you can't use standard economic theories to determine the result.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think you're right.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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."

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

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