i’m gonna try out something a little different here on the ol’ blog. BUT, i need your help.

this will be a 2-part post, consisting of this entry and an explanatory post tomorrow. i don’t want to give away too many details other than to say that the following scenario is not something i’ve created. this has been around since the late 70s/early 80s (maybe prior to that??) and has been used, primarily, in connection with cognitive development psychology.

so, what do i need from you? read the following scenario and simply answer, in the comments, the question that it asks at the end (also feel free to email your response, comment on facebook or reply on twitter…though the comments are probably most constructive). don’t feel obligated to write a novel. it can literally be as short as a sentence or as long as several paragraphs.

there are no right or wrong answers. i’m simply collecting responses that will correlate with the follow-up post tomorrow.

thanks in advance!

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Bill, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Bill got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife.

Should Bill have broken into the store to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

let me know what you think!