People like pizza more than their friends, study shows

Out of all the foods, I gotta be real with you here for a mad second, pizza is near the top. I absolutely god and damn love a socking great pizza. Load of cheese, nice slabs of meat chucked all over the place, maybe even a fancy addition like pesto, then a load of chilli oil, and hot damn, I’m folding that sucker over and threading it down my greased esophagus, while making wholly inappropriate sounds. I am foul.

This love of mine appears to be shared with a great chunk of the population, too. I know this, because a) I am not an idiot; and b) a study conducted by MIT proved that most people like pizza more than their friends.

What they did, was offer a free pizza to a bunch of people if they gave out their friends email addresses. 98% of people took the free pizza, and gave away their mates’ personal details.

About 74% of people in the US reckon it’s “very important” to be in control of their personal information and 60% say they wouldn’t be too keen on sharing their email contacts with untrusted outlets, but hey, if there’s free pizza on the table, then 98% of them forget all that and take the juicy slabs of orgasmic dough.

The authors wrote:

“Whereas people say they care about privacy, they are willing to relinquish private data quite easily when incentivised to do so.

“The results highlight how small incentives such as a cheese pizza can have a large effect on decisions about privacy.

"[It is] important to rethink how consent is given in all these applications, mostly to make sure that consumers are actually making a choice consistent with their preferences.

"As more of our lives are becoming digital, making sure we have control over how and when our data is used will become more important over time.”

Yes, this is all well and good, but giving away someone’s email doesn’t actually mean anything, really, does it? I’d give away all my mates’ email addresses for a free pizza – I’d do it for free, as a joke. Sign my mates up to the PornHub newsletter or something for a bit of “lighthearted banter”. Give the debt collectors their email address. Rob a bank and leave their email address on a calling card. It’s all a laugh, they’ll understand.

Offer me free pizza and I’ll literally push them under a bus. I love pizza, and nothing will stand in the way of me eating it. At university, I once sat on the floor outside in the pouring rain and ate two twelve-inch pizzas to myself because people kept trying to ask for a slice. Yes, I understand that is decidedly too much pizza for one man, but I paid six whole quid for them, and I’ll be damned if some light-fingered hyena is gonna swipe a slice for free.

(Images: iStock)