Picture this: You're in a room participating in a psychology experiment. An experimenter comes in and gives you $12 in cash. The experimenter says that this cash was taken from someone in another room, someone you'll never meet, and your job is to decide how to fairly divide the money between that person and yourself. You could give it all back. You could divide it evenly. You could keep all $12 and send $0 back. What do you do?
As it turns out, what you do depends in part on what the rooms smells like. See, in this experiment half of the participants were in a room that smelled like oranges. The other half were in a room that didn't really smell like anything, but either way, people in both conditions didn't notice any particular smells. What's super interesting is the result: the group in the orange flavored room gave an average of $5.33 back, while the group in the regular room gave $2.81.
So the question, then, is why does a non-detectable smell of oranges lead to more fairness?
8 comments:
It seems the smell of oranges can make one less dithspicable.
I think the smell of oranges makes people feel happy, so they are more giving. Based on this theory, whenever you are going to ask for a loan, you know what to smear in your hair beforehand.
Mom
Oranges smell clean, so people split the money more cleanly :)
We need to put the smell of oranges in the offering basket at church!!! Jan
It seems the smell of oranges makes it less difficult to keep something that is not ours to begin with.
Orange you glad scientists do experiments to make us think...
Hey, basketballs should smell like oranges because they look like them and they taste like em too...
they were happier and felt like being nice
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