I forget which of Ariely's books talks about doing a study in India with dangling sums of money that aren't too big for us but very meaningful to his research subjects, and the whole thing seemed kind of cruel to me.
That was in this month's book, PI (may have been in the after part of the revised and expanded edition, IIRC?), and gives us a great topic of discussion for this thread! :)
I didn't find it cruel at all.
To refresh people: it was trying to test if big payments to CEOs helped their performance. So it was offering incentives like 3-6 month's worth of someone's pay as a "bonus" on a task if they performed well. Since that would be quite expensive here (costing payments from 20-100k++), they did it in India where wages were quite low.
They then gave these people tasks (physical, mental, etc.) and monitored their performance versus people that didn't have the giant incentives. The people with the incentives tended to perform the same or worse, not better.
To me, that's an awesome opportunity to earn lots of money. If I was offered 6-months pay for a short study, I'd be ecstatic, not think it was cruel. Especially if I were living in a situation where that sort of money made a large difference in standard of living.
Did others reading that this month think that was cruel, or not? (Please base your answer on what you read in the book, not the summary from my faulty memory above, and feel free to correct any errors or omissions I made.)