replace that paper

Doesn't this "replace" have to be "place"? It doesn't seem to make sense.

21)I’ll bet that if you’re in the habit of buying the morning paper, you skip the one directly on top of the pile. Instead, you lift up the top newspaper and pull out the one directly underneath it. Did you know that consciously or not, 72 percent of people do the same? Why? Because we imagine that the second one from the top hasn’t been handled by countless fingertips and is therefore somehow cleaner than the one above it. Ironically, though, after scanning the headlines, many of that same 72 percent of consumers replace that paper right where they found it, under the top one. So they all end up thumbing through the same newspaper that has been touched over and over.

No. They pick up a paper and then they put it back where it was. It was already placed there by the newspaper seller. The people who pick it up and read it then replace it.

As I understand, they pick up the second one from the top and not to make it look a little bit dirty and used, they place it at the same second place instead of putting it at the top. So the place doesn't change, I guess.

keannu said:

As I understand, they pick up the second one from the top and not to make it look a little bit dirty and used, they place it at the same second place instead of putting it at the top. So the place doesn't change, I guess.

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That's the whole point of the article. Yes, they 'place' it second. But 'replace' has all the connotations that emphasise the futility of selecting the second paper, whereas 'place' doesn't.

Yes, I agree. They lift up the corner of the top paper. They remove the second paper in the pile. They read that paper. They lift up the corner of the top paper again. They put the paper they read back in the pile in exactly the same position they found it. They replaced it exactly where they found it.