The secret to why money is so good at changing people’s minds

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/11/the-secret-to-why-money-is-so-good-at-changing-peoples-minds/

The secret to why money is so good at changing people’s minds

By Jeff Guo

It is illegal in the United States, and most other countries, to pay people for their organs.
It is not illegal, though, to pay people to eat bugs. So that is what Sandro Ambuehl, a doctoral candidate in economics at Stanford, recently did, to show how money can make you a little crazy.
Medical ethicists say that allowing payment for body parts may force people into doing things they don’t want to do.  As one government report puts it, “financial need should not be linked in a coercive way to giving consent for organ procurement.” Classic economic theory has always been skeptical of this argument. How does it harm you if someone offers you a chance to make money? You could always turn the offer down, and be no worse off for it.
But Ambuehl argues that financial incentives can warp your perceptions of the world. His research illustrates how people behave irrationally once money is on the line. Some literally start to see reality differently.
“Potentially, financial incentives can make people worse off because you change what they believe they are getting into,” Ambuehl said in an interview.
In one of his experiments, Ambuehl randomly offered hundreds of people either $3 or $30 to eat from a menu of insects. These were not cute bugs. These were large, hairy crickets and silkworms. For real. Here are his pictures…

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http://web.stanford.edu/~sambuehl/archive/AmbuehlJMP