Dan Ariely, a best-selling author and psychology and behavioural economics professor at Duke University, studied how wearing an imitation designer wear can affect the person wearing it.
Using the lure of Chloé accessories, Dan and his colleagues enlisted many female MBA students for the experiment. They assigned each woman to one of three conditions: authentic, fake or no information.
They told the first group that the sunglasses were genuine, the second, fake, and didn’t give the third any information about the sunglasses’ authenticity. (In actuality, all the sunglasses were genuine.)
The students were tasked to walked around the hallway with the sunglasses on to get accustomed to them. Soon after, they were given 20 sets of 12 numbers (3.42, 7.32 and so on), and were asked to find in each set the two numbers that add up to 10. They had five minutes to solve as many as possible and were paid for each correct answer.
The test was set up so that the women could cheat – report that they solved more sets than they did (after shredding their worksheet and all the evidence). Of course, they didn’t know the shredder only cut off both the extreme sides of the papers so that Dan and his colleagues could figure out who cheated and by how much.
While “only” 30 percent of the first group reported solving more matrices than they actually had, 74 percent of those in the fake condition (second group) reported solving more matrices than they actually had. The third group, 42 percent.
While these results suggest that wearing a genuine product does not increase our honesty (or at least not by much). But once we knowingly put on a counterfeit product, moral constraints loosen to some degree, making it easier for us to take further steps down the path of dishonesty.
The moral of the story is?
If you, your friend, or someone you know wear counterfeit products, be careful! Another act of dishonesty may be closer than you expect.
If you want to find out how we lie to others, and ourselves, check out Dan’s book, “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves.”
