Researchers find people pay more at auctions if they believe a celebrity touched items
Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 09:30
in Psychology & Sociology
Psychologists George Newman and Paul Bloom, of Yale University have found that people buying items at an auction will pay more if they believe a celebrity has actually at some point touched them—passing on their essence in some inexplicable way. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two describe two experiments they carried out on what they call "contagion"—where people believe that the essence of a person can be imbued into an object by touching it.