To further explore the idea that separating cheating or theft from actual money makes it easer, Ariel conducted another experiment that paid subjects for math problems they solved correctly.

The money, meanwhile, was untouched in every case, and Ariely finally removed the plates and recovered it all. What do you think he found 72 hours later? Surely, placing money in an area accessible by many people is crazy… it would be gone in minutes, right? In fact, the Cokes started disppearing within hours and were completely gone by the third day.

He scurried through the dorms at MIT looking for communal refrigerators, and placed either Cokes or a money plate in each fridge. So, he set out with six-packs of Coke and plates containing six one-dollar bills. He theorized that it’s easier to steal when the object is one step removed from cash, noting that you might steal a pencil from your work place but probably not the money to buy a pencil. Ariely wanted to better understand how people like the Enron executives responsible for fleecing millions from shareholders and retirees could do that, but would likely be unwilling to steal ten dollars from an old lady’s purse.

I’m going to discuss some of the pricing topics Ariely covers in subsequent posts, but here’s an example of how a seemingly trivial experiment can yield interesting, and perhaps unexpected results. The simplicity is deceptive, though, because the results demonstrate the complexity of the brain’s decision-making process. Instead of using multi-million dollar fMRI machines, Ariely’s work tends to involve a simple concept, a few props, and willing subjects (always plentiful on college campuses). Ariely’s work is fascinating at least in part because of the simplicity of most of his experiments. Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke, describes dozens of experiments that show how we procrastinate, when we cheat, how we interpret prices (definitely a neuromarketing hot button), and much more. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely does a great job of demolishing the idea that people make decisions in a rational manner.

Predictably irrational español