Understanding the Forbidden Fruit Effect: People's Desire to See What Is Forbidden and Unavailable

FitzGibbon, Lily, Cansu Ogulmus, Greta M. Fastrich, Johnny K. L. Lau, Sumeyye Aslan, Lorella Lepore, and Kou Murayama. 2020. “Understanding the Forbidden Fruit Effect: People's Desire to See What Is Forbidden and Unavailable.” OSF Preprints. February 17. doi:10.31219/osf.io/ndpwt

Abstract: Curiosity - the drive for information - is often perceived as a dangerous trait. This is exacerbated by the perception that when something is forbidden, curiosity towards it increases. Surprisingly little is known about the mechanisms by which this forbidden fruit effect occurs. In a series of five experiments (total N = 2,141), we used a novel card selection task with an arbitrarily forbidden card to demonstrate the forbidden fruit effect across a broad age range (5 to 79 years). All of the experiments controlled for uncertainty of forbidden card, and the effect remained when we controlled for visual saliency, potential item selection bias, and even when participants were aware that the prohibited card had been selected randomly. These results suggest that people's attraction to unavailable options is not only driven by their beliefs about importance or scarcity but also by lower-level cognitive mechanisms such as memory availability.