外刊阅读20240718｜天上掉的是“馅饼”还是“陷阱”？

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If a stranger offered you a free cookie, you might well eat it. But what if they offered to also give you $2? You might politely decline and walk away thinking, “Something smells fishy.” In a study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers found that people tend to turn down offers of “free money” (as well as unusually high salaries or suspiciously cheap services) because they seem “too good to be true.” The research bridges economics and psychology to explain why financial incentives can backfire .

In the initial experiment, nearly 40 percent of participants ate a cookie offered freely—compared with about 20 percent of those offered $2 as well. “People typically imagine things like that someone did something disgusting to the cookie,” says study lead author Andrew J. Vonasch, a psychological scientist at University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Nine further experiments, involving more than 4,000 participants, used online questionnaires to present other scenarios. These included being offered money to accept a ride home, outrageously high construction-job wages and surprisingly cheap flights. In each case, past a certain threshold, higher potential monetary gain reduced participants’ likelihood of accepting the offer.

If someone seems to violate accepted norms such as self-interest without explanation, we assume they have hidden motives and infer there will be “ phantom costs”: imagined consequences that reduce what Vonasch calls an offer’s “psychological value.”

Factors beyond the present moment may come into play. “Understanding that others’ perceived overgenerosity may put us in their debt could also help explain people’s reluctance,” says Rachel McCloy, a psychologist studying decision-making at England’s University of Reading. “The old maxim ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ is clearly alive and well.”