The First Step to Sin

Researchers invited one hundred people to participate in a study. They put participants in pairs. The task: to guess how many coins were in a series of jars. One participant would be shown large images, while the other would see only small, fuzzy images. The person who’d seen the large images would help the person who saw the small, fuzzy images to make good guesses.

The more accurate the guess by the person who had seen only the small, fuzzy image, the more both participants would receive.

They p...