Look and feel

"The value of a coin or banknote depends on its familiarityIF RATIONALITY reigned supreme in economics, travellers would spend their foreign cash based upon its value in the currency of their home country. All too often, however, they actually treat foreign banknotes as though they were Monopoly money. Given the unfamiliarity of other countries' currencies that is not, perhaps, surprising. But a piece of research about to be published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review by Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer, a pair of psychologists at Princeton University, shows that something similar is true even of familiar currencies, depending on the form they come in. In particular, Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer have demonstrated that the perceived value of a dollar changes with the form that dollar takes. For the first part of their study Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer picked 37 ?volunteers? at random from the university's canteen. They asked them to estimate how many simple objects?gumballs, paperclips and pencils?they could purchase with either a standard dollar bill or a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin that was presented to them. Susan B. Anthony dollars are legal tender but, having been produced only from 1979-81 and then again in 1999, they are rarely seen in circulation. ..." (2008-4-3)

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