Damaging Your Phone, Accidentally on Purpose

The New York Times:

Oops, you “accidentally” dropped your phone in the pool. Too bad you now have to buy an upgrade.

Every so often, Apple comes out with an updated iPhone. It typically has new features and attracts a lot of buzz, which causes many consumers to lust for an upgrade. As it turns out, all that buzz can also lead to an increase in iPhone accidents.

When a new model is available, according to recent research, people who have iPhones tend to become more careless with the phones they already own.

…

Professor Bellezza embarked on the research because she was interested in “whether consumers break things on purpose because they need a justification,” she said. She was joined in the study by Joshua Ackerman of the University of Michigan and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School.

The three looked at a database of about 3,000 iPhones on a website where people can register their stolen, lost or found devices. They discovered that people were less likely to try to track down their lost phones when an upgrade was available. This was “a nice proxy for carelessness in the real world,” Professor Bellezza said. The results were replicated in their own survey of 600 cellphone owners, she said.

Read the whole story: The New York Times