The 'specialness spiral:' Why we label ordinary objects as too special to use
&gt; To find out, we ran another experiment in which participants imagined buying a bottle of wine. We had half of the participants imagine considering opening it one night, but deciding not to.<p>This is the second study like this on HN in a couple weeks.<p>When the heck did asking participants to <i>imagine</i> something and then asking them how they felt, and assuming this tells you something valid about things other than imagining things... when did this become a popular form of research?<p>It seems crazy to me.