I've always been really interested in what makes people tick. I think I probably should have majored in Psychology instead of Computer Science. So with the success of books like "Freakonomics", there has been a rash of interesting books on quirky people. One of the ones I've read lately (well, listened to the tape) is Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It's so fascinating and this guy has the COOLEST job! He just goes around and does all these experiments and watches how people react. How fun!

One experiment that really fascinated me was the power of FREE. He did all these experiments where he tested the lengths people will go to to get something for free, even if it's something that's totally useless to them, or at least not worth the trouble and expense they go through to get it. For instance, just this morning my son stood in line for nearly an hour out in the cold to get a free Grand Slam breakfast at Denny's. Now if he'd spent that hour working instead, he would have earned enough money to probably buy two breakfasts. But I guess that wouldn't have tasted as good as the FREE breakfast.

He did another set of experiments about cheating that led to an interesting conclusion. First he did a series of tests with different groups of college students. He told them right up front that they would be grading their own tests and then shredding them, which gave them ample opportunity to cheat as much as they chose to and he offered them different rewards based on the number of questions they got right. The students with no reward only cheated a tiny bit. The students with a small monetary reward, say a nickel for every correct answer, cheated a bit more, but not as much as you'd think. They'd only fudge 2-4 answers per test, which would earn them an extra .20 or so. But when the researchers changed the reward to plastic chips, the cheating went way up - some even gave themselves a perfect score. Interesting....

He did another kind of follow-up experiment to expand on this idea. He went into the dorms and snuck some extra things into the fridges on every floor. He put a six-pack of Coke and a plate with a bunch of dollar bills in each fridge. What would you think a bunch of cash-poor college kids would do in this case?

When he came back in about three days, without exception - ALL of the sodas were gone and NONE of the dollar bills had been touched! Isn't that weird? It seems like people consider taking actual money as real honest-to-God stealing, but taking non-monetary things like the sodas or the plastic tokens, or office supplies, or things are aren't actual money as OK to take. Kind of makes sense why identity theft, embezzlement, and other kinds of non-monetary crimes are going up so fast because we've divorced ourselves from real money. It just doesn't seem as much like stealing when you're just dealing with computers and plastic. It doesn't feel as much like "real" spending either and that's how the credit card companies get all our money from us.

There you go - something to make you go hmmmm.