Moving up encourages doing good
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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Let’s say you are trying to sell cookies for a school fundraiser at the local mall, and you want to pick the ideal spot to set up your table. You’d probably look for an area with a lot of traffic. And once you’d picked your spot, you would no doubt give some thought to your pitch. A friendly hello and nice smile would set the stage nicely. Perhaps it would be a good idea to offer samples or to have friends hanging around saying nice things about the cookies or the school.
A recent Journal of Experimental Social Psychology article by Larry Sanna and his associates at the University of North Carolina suggests a more surprising factor that you might want to consider – proximity to an escalator.
Building on research showing the power of metaphors to shape our thinking, Sanna and his colleagues noted that height is often used as a metaphor for virtue: moral high ground, God on high, looking up to good people, etc. If people were primed to think about height, they wondered, might people be more virtuous?
In a series of four different studies, the authors found consistent support for their predictions. In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator. In a second study, participants who had been taken up a short flight of stairs to an auditorium stage to complete a series of questionnaires volunteered more than 50 percent more of their time than participants who had been led down to the orchestra pit.
A third study took yet another approach. Participants were to decide how much hot sauce to give to a participant purportedly taking part in a food-tasting study. Those who were up on the stage gave only half as much of the painfully hot sauce to the other person as did those who were sitting down in the orchestra pit.
In a final study, participants watched film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car. Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground.
Overall these studies show remarkable consistency, linking height and different prosocial behaviors -- i.e., donations, volunteering, compassion, and cooperation. While we may be inclined to think that our behaviors are the product of comprehensive thought processes, carefully weighing the pros and cons of alternatives, these results clearly show that this is not always the case.
Initial forays into understanding when and why help might be given to those in need began after the well-publicized murder of Kitty Genovese nearly 50 years ago, an attack that many people may have witnessed but did nothing to stop. That original work identified numerous situational factors that seemed to explain why help was not rendered, including important social factors related to how the presence of other people may cause people to misinterpret the situation as not being an emergency or to abdicate personal responsibility to provide the aid, even if the need for help is clear.
More recently researchers have recognized the roles played by dispositions. Personality factors may lead some people to be more prosocial than others: those who empathize with others and “feel their pain” may be more likely to get involved and offer help. Individuals with a sense of self-efficacy, that is, a belief that they can accomplish whatever they set out to do, may also be more likely to help others.
What the present research adds is that unconscious processes may also be important in determining whether we will act to help others. Sanna’s work expands a multilevel perspective of prosocial behavior by recognizing that even the most subtle of situational cues (e.g., metaphorical devices that arouse relevant unconscious thought) may make people more helpful. Perhaps understanding the impact of these myriad factors more fully will help make our world a more helpful and cooperative place to live.
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12 Comments
Add CommentI wonder if the same conclusions still hold in other languages that lack these metaphors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTitle is very misleading. Escalators do not bring out the best in people. Only one of the four studies involved escalators. And in that study, only people getting off the up escalator were shown to donate more than people getting off the down escalator. The study also appeared not to have a control in an area where there was not an escalator.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe escalators bring out the worst in people. I definite know it brings out the laziness in people. I never understood why healthy able-body people just stand on the escalator. It is especially annoying in single lane escalators where it is difficult to get by the person (like the one on 34th St/6th Ave subway stop in NYC).
Cramer in Comment #2: There was a control condition, if you read the actual report referenced in the article. The rest of your comments seem whiny.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like your take on this story. This sort of pop psych study frustrates me. It is very simple and does not necessarily take all factors in. The plane versus car portion is just silly. Maybe human beings just find airplanes more exciting because of the clouds, or being in car settings merely remind them of the smell of gasoline. Maybe walking down into an orchestra pit is just not a fun experience. I know from being in a concert band for 10 years of my life that those pits are dusty and grimy (don't get me wrong, it's not disgusting, but I might be a little sketched out if I didn't belong there either). Certainly not whiny, simply a thoughtful take on a superficial study.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisgesres,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes, I can see where it does sound whiny. It was meant to be a somewhat humorous tongue-in-cheek comment based on the first thing that came to my head when I saw the title.
Thanks for the heads up. I will definitely avoid up escalators to avoid giving away more of scarce money. And to curb my usual exaggerated and unjustifiable optimism and empathy. Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is an interesting article. Perhaps it will lead to a national commission on escalator policy and another way to manipulate human beings. Escalators may be recognized by Homeland Security as part of our critical infrastructure. The TSA may become aware that they are a mode of transportation and require security checks, xray screening, and even radom colonoscopies for contraband. Where would we be if someone tried to hijack an escalator? It's a horrible thought: plastic bags everywhere, people screaming. We can never be too safe. Glad someone is checking out this subject. The only real question I have has to do with the down escalator. What do they do when the basement fills up with stairs?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn a mall, someone riding an up escalator is probably arriving and preparing to spend some time and money . The person riding a down escalator is more likely to be heading home-- and possibly in a hurry to get away– after already having spent a good deal of time and money in the mall. These circumstances are almost certainly more important than any supposed metaphorical effect of height.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's possible to control for this. Find a mall that's mostly underground or at least below the level of the main entrance floor. See if you get the same result.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had the same thought Dimitris.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, this article doesn't mention any controls for factors such as socioeconomic status, energy lost from each trip up and down stair, etc....
"Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground."
This does not seem to prove anything at all. In fact it may even be contrary to their point. If allegedly seeing other people above you makes you more stingy, then shouldn't watching something fly up in the clouds give the participant a penurious attitude?
This whole study seems like a load of horse shit, excuse my french.
I wonder if these findings are reflected in domestic violence statistics in muliti-storey residential buildings.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo now I know why the church really favors sites at the top of hills!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo seriously - Is it just as likely that you have less time to think about donating when you get to the top of an escalator whereas on the way down you will see the 'trap' much earlier and you have lots of time to mentally justify hanging on to your cash?
It would be exactly the same as being caught speeding as you go over the brow of a hill or around a corner as opposed to being on a straight section with much more warning and time to slow down?