“Carrying fake brands makes us feel like phonies, cheaters on the inside: Study”

Carrying fake brands makes us feel like phonies, cheaters on the inside: Study

Posted: 25 Aug 2010 03:03 AM PDT

New York, Aug 25 : If you carry a fake Prada bag or a knock-off pair of sunglasses from Chlloe, you might turn into a dishonest, cynical person, according to a new study.

Scientists from Harvard, Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted an experiment that began by giving a large group of women a pair of expensive Chloe sunglasses.

The researchers allowed half of the women to believe they were wearing counterfeit shades - a form of dishonesty - in order to ascertain if they would act dishonestly in other ways.

The women were to perform tasks that presented opportunities for deception and to score their work on the "honour system."

The women who thought they were wearing the fake Chloe shades were found to be the bigger cheaters— 70 percent inflated their performance when they thought nobody was checking on them while just 30 percent of the group who knew they wore authentic sunglasses cheated.

Interestingly, the women wearing the supposedly phony goods cheated even though the ''fake'' sunglasses were randomly handed out, suggesting that very act of wearing the alleged knockoffs was the factor that made one act dishonestly.

The women underwent further questioning regarding morals, business and friendship.

The subjects who believed they were wearing the phony Chloe sunglasses saw other people as more dishonest, less truthful and more likely to act unethically.

"''Faking it'' makes us feel like phonies and cheaters on the inside, and this alienated, counterfeit ''self'' leads to cheating and cynicism in the real world. Most people buy these fake brand-name items because they are a lot cheaper than the real deal, but this research suggests that a hidden moral cost has yet to be tallied," the New York Daily News quoted Wray Herbert in Scientific American as saying.

The study has been published in Psychological Science and excerpted in Scientific American.

--ANI

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