If you walked past someone who was offering you a choice between a 10-ounce bar of silver or a Hershey’s bar, which would you pick?
Even if you don’t know what the bar of silver is worth, you do know, intuitively, that it’s worth more than a crappy bar of chocolate.
So, you’d pick the bar of silver, right?
Watch this video, and see what happened when someone did that experiment:
This is interesting, because everyone chose the candy bar (sorry to spoil the video if you didn’t watch it). He ran out of candy bars. Nobody took him up on the bar of silver.
Why?
I’m not sure, but I tried putting myself in their shoes, and I came up with a couple ideas:
- People are wary of strangers on the street, and think that it might be a trick.
- Chocolate is a known, a bar of silver is an unknown.
- You’re more likely to be allowed to walk away if you take a bar of chocolate, and who knows what the guy might want from you if you take a bar of silver.
It makes me want to do an experiment like this, because I think, hey, of course I would take the silver, but if nobody did? There’s something else at work there.
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