50 Choosing Beggars Who Took Entitlement To A Whole New Level (New Pics)

There’s a short, one-syllable word that never fails to light up our brains, send sparks flying, and make our inner bargain hunter perk up.

F-r-e-e.

For the promise of something absolutely free—no strings attached—many of us are willing to jump through hoops, even when the item in question is cheap, useless, or requires a surprising amount of spending just to claim it.

Think: “Buy one, get one free” deals, signing up for a newsletter to enter a giveaway, or scrambling for pens and socks at a university fair.

While it makes sense to try and save money where we can, people often place a wildly inflated value on things that cost zero dollars.

Of course, we’re not talking about the kind of “free” that choosing beggars demand, like asking someone to design a logo or bake a cake for nothing, but rather how powerful the idea of zero cost really is.

A well-known experiment featured in Dan Ariely’s bestseller Predictably Irrational helps explain this behavior.

Participants were asked to choose between spending 26 cents on a luxury Lindt chocolate truffle or 1 cent on a lower-quality Hershey’s kiss.

The group was split fairly evenly between the two. But when the experimenters lowered both prices by one cent, making the Hershey’s kiss free, the outcome changed dramatically.

Suddenly, the vast majority chose the free chocolate, even though the price difference between the options stayed the same. That’s the power of zero: it changes how we evaluate value altogether.

So why do we chase free stuff like it’s gold, even when we don’t really want it? Dr. Eva Krockow, associate professor of psychology at the University of Leicester, shed some light on the topic in a piece for Psychology Today.

Different factors can drive our love of freebies, but emotions are a big one, according to Krockow.

“A positive charge is experienced when offered an unexpected gift, and this sensation of joy is likely to impact heavily on the subsequent choice,” she says.

That joy makes the freebie feel like a special little reward, something we want to chase.

There’s also the fact that we tend to lower our standards when we’re not paying.

So we might end up happily accepting a weirdly designed notepad with paper so thin it’s see-through, just because it didn’t cost us a cent.

But, as the saying goes, the only place you’ll find free cheese is in a mousetrap. Most of the time, there’s a catch.

“Many marketing deals, for example, involve a minimum spending condition, which requires customers to purchase other items in order to become eligible for a gift,” says Krockow.

“Other offers, including vouchers for specific supermarkets, are designed to lure you into different stores, expose you to new products and thereby entice you into buying additional items while you’re there,” she adds.