The Price of Faking It

There's a saying that clothes don't make the man, but a lot of times the clothes we wear (accessories and tattoos included) do at least say something about who we are. (If you're famous, it may even happen that the clothes you don't wear say something about who you are).

Besides signaling to others, clothes obviously also have an effect on how we feel about ourselves, and as a recent study shows, this sense of self that we derive from certain clothing produces measurable behavior changes. In particular, the study which was conducted by Francesca Gina, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely and appeared in this month's edition of the journal Psychological Science, looked at the relation between wearing counterfeit products and cheating.

As the study shows, wearing counterfeit products, influences people's cheating behavior and even has an effect on people's perception of how honest their peers are. Here's a brief summary of the research:

85 female students were invited to the research lab; ostensibly to evaluate the quality of different types of sunglasses. Before starting the main part of the experiment, each participant stated preferences across a range of products on a computer. They were then (randomly) told that the computer program had calculated a preference for either authentic or counterfeit products, and depending on which preference was stated, participants were asked to fetch a pair of sunglasses from a box labeled either authentic or counterfeit. Both of the boxes actually contained an identical sample of ten different pairs of designer sunglasses - each worth around 300$ and none of them counterfeits. (The purpose of the preceding assignment stage was to make participant's believe that they had been assigned their particular pair of glasses, based on personal preferences). The experiment continued with participants being asked to wear the sunglasses and engage in a number of different tasks.

Some of these tasks (e.g. an arithmetic calculation task, or a perception task) were designed in such a way that participants would receive a final pay-off based on their self-reported performance on the task. To make the opportunity to cheat even more tempting, participants were lulled into the false belief that the experimenters would not be able to tell whether they had cheated or not (performance sheets and self-reports appeared not to be labeled). Hence, participants found themselves in a situation in which they thought they might cheat without being found out.

As you may now expect, people who believed that they were wearing counterfeits ended up being less honest about their performance in the experiment: 71% of participants in the counterfeit group lied (compared to only 30% in the "authentic" group). The extent of over-reporting for the arithmetic task is nicely illustrated in the graph below:

 As mentioned earlier, counterfeit products did not only influence people's cheating behavior, but also had effects on how participants perceived other people's honesty. To investigate this, the researchers ran a similar experiment to the one above in which participants - while wearing the glasses believed to be either fake or authentic - were asked to (among other things) answer a set of questions. Some of these questions were specifically designed to elicit beliefs about other people's honesty, and in response to these questions

"Participants in the counterfeit-sunglasses condition reported people they knew to be more likely to behave dishonestly than did participants in the authentic-sun-glasses condition They also interpreted common excuses as less likely to be truthful"

"[...] In short, compared with participants who believed they were wearing authentic sunglasses, participants who believed they were wearing fake sunglasses interpreted other people's behavior as more dishonest, considered common behaviors to be less truthful, and believed that others would be more likely to behave unethically."

In a third experiment, designed to get at the true nature of what was mediating the observed effect, the researchers found that a sense of "inauthenticity", which followed from wearing the supposedly counterfeit product seemed to be the driving force behind what they found, and that it was truly the wearing of counterfeit products that was e.g. reducing honesty (in comparison to the supposedly authentic products improving honesty).

The study's authors suggest

"at the outset [of their study] that people adopt counterfeit products because they are trying to improve their self-image"

Ironically, their study shows that these counterfeit products actually harm self-image by causing a sense of inauthenticity, or inducing what the authors term a "counterfeit self".

The question then becomes,

" Why [...] do people buy counterfeit products?"

"One view, of course, is that the benefits of counterfeits outweigh these costs, and that people make a calculated trade-off. We suspected, however, that people may simply overlook the possible negative consequences of adopting counterfeits. Indeed, when we asked a separate set of students to predict the impact of counterfeits, they were unaware of the consequences for ethical behavior."

Which doesn't mean there aren't clear positive upsides to being unaware...

[Note: In case you were wondering whether behavior in the first study was possibly due to the assignment process in which people were made to think the computer had detected in them a preference for counterfeits (i.e. that they might actually be less honest types), there is a modified experiment published in the same article, which addresses this. The combined results make this alternative interpretation rather unlikely]

Main Reference: Gino F, Norton MI, & Ariely D (2010). The counterfeit self: the deceptive costs of faking it. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 21 (5), 712-20 PMID: 20483851