Utynam's Heirs

01 July 2010

A monthly column devoted to IP curiosities and controversies, named in honour of John of Utynam – who received the world’s first recorded patent in 1449 diary@managingip.com

Fakes blow your mind

Does buying counterfeits make you a bad person? The answer is, literally, yes, according to research published in the journal Psychological Science and reported on the website PsyBlog.

The research involved four experiments where people were given designer sunglasses: some of them were told they were real and some were told they were fake. According to PsyBlog: "The results showed that, when told the sunglasses were fake, people behaved in more unethical ways than when told they were real. In one experiment, those wearing sunglasses they were told were authentic cheated on a task 30% of the time, while those told they were fake cheated 71% of the time."

In addition, people who believed they were wearing fake sunglasses were more likely to believe that other people were more dishonest and...

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