It's no secret that any morality we pretend to have crumbles the instant cash is introduced into the equation. Some devious British scientists decided to prove this by offering test subjects cash to shock people; pretty much everyone took the cash.

The best part of this experiment is that when presented with a hypothetical choice, 64 percent of participants said they would never even think of shocking someone in exchange for cash. What do you take them for, animals?

But when scientists dangled real cash in front of a subject's face in exchange for administering a real shock to someone, 96 percent electrocuted the hell out of the poor bastard. (Technically the shocks were real but pre-recorded.) And they kept shocking them until they earned, on average, 11.55 pounds out of a possible 20.

This harkens back to the infamous Milgram experiment, in which participants delivered what they believed to be fatal shocks to someone just because a scientist told them to. It's unclear whether these studies prove deep truths about human psychology or that scientist just really love shocking people. [Wired]

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