Huh?

What does that even mean? If you can get something for nothing, it is dishonest to accept it? Gifts? Wild fruit? Special offers? Food samples at the market? Casual Sex (ok, this one takes some form of input)? Unconditional love? Sunlight? A guy with a sandwich-board giving away free fivers?

I thought the best things in life were free. I musta missed a memo.

Charity?

If he’d offered £10, then he might have had more luck.

What they don’t explain is just how people were supposed to know it was a genuine, no-strings-attached offer. Giving people a gift, even a gift they don’t want, forces them into a position where they feel they have to reciprocate. It’s a classic sales and scamming technique.

Personally, I feel like giving up my chance at the occasional string-free five pound note is more than worth not having to deal with all of the pressure to reciprocate that arises after accepting other free “gifts.”

“This exercise reveals a fundamental inertia which is stopping people from making sensible financial decisions”

BS. As many people have pointed out, the sensible decision was actually to pass the offer up. Most people assumed that this would be some kind of scam that would either expose them to additional financial loss or at best waste their time — which is very valuable. It was simply not enough money to risk the unknown costs. The decision NOT to engage by most people was COMPLETELY rational.

First, typing in caps doesn’t so much prove your point as make you sound like you’re ranting.

Second, it’s only rational if you believe that the world is a hostile place filled with people who are out to get you. If you believe that, you have my sympathy, but I would still have £5 more than you.

I also notice that, in the picture above, he is standing on Tottenham Court Road. Fifty yards behind him on the left is the office of the Church of Scientology. I walk along that section of street quite often and I don’t accept anything from anyone, lest I find myself taking a ‘free stress test’.

This is a worthless piece of fake research (wait, worthless AND fake? I should have expressed that better. Never mind, moving on…) which has solely been conducted in order to get ‘soft’ media stories from the press release with the results. What a nice easy way of getting your company’s web address plastered all over various media. Oh look, it worked. There’s your real psychology.

Is it a scam? Is it like the Hare Krishnas who offer “free” stickers but once you grab them won’t let them go until you give a “donation”? Is it some weird social experiment that I will get dragged into? Will I end up in the middle of someone’s performance art piece? Is there a hidden camera somewhere and I’m going to be humiliated on TV? When I take the money will some tabloid TV journalist jump out of the bushes, stick a microphone in my face and accuse me of God-knows-what?

By the time I went through all of that I would decide it wasn’t worth the risk and would have passed the guy anyway.

No, all this experiment shows that people are sensibly wary after being bitten too many times.

(If you’re not an Aussie, you probably first heard about The Chaser when they got a fake motorcade within 200m of Bush’s hotel during APEC.)

/If you want it, here it is, come and get it…
-The Magic Christian

Women trust women better, well, I think.

In London especially, the skunk dealers, newspaper pushers, Scientologists and advertisements are incredibly invasive. To survive your pedestrian journey, you must ignore as many of these hindrances as possible.

I think the gender issue may have to do with the fact that women are even LESS likely to want to get in a conversation with a random dude on the street–most of the encounters I’ve had like that were quite creepy.

Personally, I would have avoided the guy without a second thought. I would have automatically assumed that there was a catch which was going to require me to about face quickly and rudely, or spend half an hour listening to someone babble insanely or sell me something.

Would I have missed out on some cash? Sure. Of course, I would have been on to better things while the idiot talking to every crackpot that comes at him spends half talking to lunatics, marketers, bums, and religious nuts, and only have £5 to show for it. My time is worth a hell of a lot more than £5.

I find that depressing. If someone greets me, I say hello. If they try to sell me something that I don’t want, I say, “No, thank you” and move on. What are you doing that’s so important that you have to walk around with a bag over your head?

* Six in ten people say … they would suspect a catch or trick.
* Twenty per cent of people would simply not believe the offer was real…
* Just over one in ten people said they would feel too embarrassed and three per cent of people said that £5 wasn’t worth the effort.