For example, imagine that you see a beggar on the street. Rather than ignoring him or giving him money, you decide to buy him a sandwich. The action in itself does not define who you are, your morality, or your character, but you interpret the deed as evidence of your compassionate and charitable character. Now, armed with this “new” information, you start believing more intensely in your own benevolence. That’s self-signaling at work.
The same principle could also apply to fashion accessories. Carrying a real Prada bag—even if no one else knows it is real—could make us think and act a little differently than if we were carrying a counterfeit one. Which brings us to the questions: Does wearing counterfeit products somehow make us feel less legitimate? Is it possible that accessorizing with fakes might affect us in unexpected and negative ways?
Calling All Chloes
I decided to call Freeda and tell her about my recent interest in high fashion. (I think she was even more surprised than I was.) During our conversation, Freeda promised to convince a fashion designer to lend me some items to use in some experiments. A few weeks later, I received a package from the Chloe label containing twenty handbags and twenty pairs of sunglasses. The statement accompanying the package told me that the handbags were estimated to be worth around $40,000 and the sunglasses around $7,000.*
With those hot commodities in hand, Francesca Gino, Mike Norton (a professor at Harvard University), and I set about testing whether participants who wore fake products would feel and behave differently from those wearing authentic ones. If our participants felt that wearing fakes would broadcast (even to themselves) a less honorable self-image, we wondered whether they might start thinking of themselves as somewhat less honest. And with this tainted self-concept in mind, would they be more likely to continue down the road of dishonesty?
Using the lure of Chloe accessories, we enlisted many female MBA students for our experiment. (We focused on women not because we thought that they were different from men in any moral way—in fact, in all of our previous experiments we did not find any sex-related differences—but because the accessories we had were clearly designed for women.) We wondered whether to use the sunglasses or the handbags in our first experiments, but when we realized that it would have been a bit more difficult to explain why we wanted our participants to walk around the building with handbags, we settled on the sunglasses.
AT THE START of the experiment, we assigned each woman to one of three conditions: authentic, fake, or no information. In the authentic condition, we told participants that they would be donning real Chloe designer sunglasses. In the fake condition, we told them that they would be wearing counterfeit sunglasses that looked identical to those made by Chloe (in actuality all the products we used were the real McCoy). Finally, in the no-information condition, we didn’t say anything about the authenticity of the sunglasses.
Once the women donned their sunglasses, we directed them to the hallway, where we asked them to look at different posters and out the windows so that they could later evaluate the quality and experience of looking through their sunglasses. Soon after, we called them into another room for another task. What was the task? You guessed it: while the women were still wearing their sunglasses we gave them our old friend, the matrix task.
Now imagine yourself as a participant in this study. You show up to the lab, and you’re randomly assigned to the fake condition. The experimenter informs you that your glasses are counterfeit and instructs you to test them out to see what you think. You’re handed a rather real-looking case (the logo is spot-on!), and you pull out the sunglasses, examine them, and slip them on. Once you’ve put on the specs, you start walking around the hallway, examining different posters and looking out the windows. But while you are doing so, what is going through your head? Do you compare the sunglasses to the pair in your car or the ones you broke the other day? Do you think, “Yeah, these are very convincing. No one would be able to tell they’re fake.” Maybe you think that the weight doesn’t feel right or that the plastic seems cheap. And if you do think about the fakeness of what you are wearing, would it cause you to cheat more on the matrix test? Less? The same amount?
Here’s what we found. As usual, lots of people cheated by a few questions. But while “only” 30 percent of the participants in the authentic condition reported solving more matrices than they actually had, 74 percent of those in the fake condition reported solving more matrices than they actually had.
These results gave rise to another interesting question. Did the presumed fakeness of the product make the women cheat more than they naturally would? Or did the genuine Chloe label make them behave more honestly than they would otherwise? In other words, which was more powerful: the negative self-signaling in the fake condition or the positive self-signaling in the authentic condition?
This is why we also had the no-information (control) condition, in which we didn’t mention anything about whether the sunglasses were real or fake. How would the no-information condition help us? Let’s say that women wearing the fake glasses cheated at the same level as those in the no-information condition. If that were the case, we could conclude that the counterfeit label did not make the women any more dishonest than they were naturally and that the genuine label was causing higher honesty. On the other hand, if we saw that the women wearing the real Chloe sunglasses cheated at the same level as those in the no-information condition (and much less than those in the fake-label condition), we would conclude that the authentic label did not make the women any more honest than they were naturally and that the fake label was causing women to behave less honestly.
As you’ll recall, 30 percent of women in the authentic condition and 73 percent of women in the fake-label condition overreported the number of matrices they solved. And in the no-information condition? In that condition 42 percent of the women cheated. The no-information condition was between the two, but it was much closer to the authentic condition (in fact, the two conditions were not statistically different from each other). These results suggest that wearing a genuine product does not increase our honesty (or at least not by much). But once we knowingly put on a counterfeit product, moral constraints loosen to some degree, making it easier for us to take further steps down the path of dishonesty.
The moral of the story? If you, your friend, or someone you are dating wears counterfeit products, be careful! Another act of dishonesty may be closer than you expect.
The “What-the-Hell” Effect
Now let’s pause for a minute to think again about what happens when you go on a diet. When you start out, you work hard to stick to the diet’s difficult rules: half a grapefruit, a slice of dry multigrain toast, and a poached egg for breakfast; turkey slices on salad with zero-calorie dressing for lunch; baked fish and steamed broccoli for dinner. As we learned in the preceding chapter, “Why We Blow It When We’re Tired,” you are now honorably and predictably deprived. Then someone puts a slice of cake in front of you. The moment you give in to temptation and take that first bite, your perspective shifts. You tell yourself, “Oh, what the hell, I’ve broken my diet, so why not have the whole slice—along with that perfectly grilled, mouthwatering cheeseburger with all the trimmings I’ve been craving all week? I’ll start anew tomorrow, or maybe on Monday. And this time I’ll really stick to it.” In other words, having already tarnished your dieting self-concept, you decide to break your diet completely and make the most of your diet-free self-image (of course you don’t take into account that the same thing can happen again tomorrow and the day after, and so on).
To examine this foible in more detail, Francesca, Mike, and I wanted to examine whether failing at one small thing (such as eating one french fry when you’re supposedly on a diet) can cause one to abandon the effort altogether.
This time, imagine you’re wearing a pair of sunglasses—whether they are authentic Chloe, a fake pair, or a pair
