Would you rather:

A) Make $50,000 while knowing all your friends and acquaintances earned $25,000

or

B) Make $100,000 while knowing all your friends and acquaintances earned $200,000

I don’t really know if it’s surprising or not, but presented with this question, the majority went for Option A. And this choice wasn’t made because these people applied their knowledge of purchasing power or inflation really well (I digress). Instead, this showed that most people just wanted to be ahead of their peers.

This mentality can be really useful since without it, our ancestors would probably not be able to out-compete predators to survive and then out-compete fellow humans to find a mating partner. You get what I mean? =)

But then, as you can see from the choices many made in the experiment above, this mentality does lead to irrational behaviour sometimes. And it’s not just the average Tom, Dick and (Read more...)