Ethical authenticity: the mask becomes the man

My former colleague Dan Gardner sent me this cool little blog entry from Jeremy Dean, alerting us to a new study looking at the relationship between the wearing of counterfeit branded goods and ethical behaviour.  It turns out that the desire to falsely signal one's status to others ends up causing one to behave less ethically, as the mask becomes the reality.

Participants were handed designer glasses and were told that sometimes they were real, sometimes they were knockoffs (but in fact, they were always genuine). The result?

The results showed that, when told the sunglasses were fake, people behaved in more unethical ways than when told they were real. In one experiment, those wearing sunglasses they were told were authentic cheated on a task 30% of the time, while those told they were fake cheated 71% of the time.

Furthermore, participants became more cynical about the behaviour of others. And so it turns out that the desire to falsely signal one's status to others ends up causing one to behave falsely in general, as the mask becomes the reality. Very interesting stuff -- the post ends with a nod to the obvious followup questions