Page 47 - The Social Animal

Conformity 29

distinguished-looking gentleman would almost certainly be fol-
lowed to a greater extent than, say, a seedy-looking fellow with
wildly darting eyes and body odor.
Indeed, research on jaywalking indicates that people will conform
more often to the behavior of a seemingly high-status person than to
the behavior of someone who looks less respectable or less well-to-do.
Across several studies, researchers have found that, when in the pres-
ence of a model who refrains from jaywalking, other pedestrians are
more likely to curb the impulse to jaywalk than people who are not ex-
posed to any model.This conformity effect is much stronger, however,
when the person modeling the behavior is neat and well attired rather
than disheveled and dressed in shabby clothes. 26

On Wasting Water and Littering Let us take this one step further.
Institutions frequently request us to perform certain behaviors with-
out making an outright demand. For example, in the men’s shower
room at my university’s field house,there is a sign asking us to practice
conservation by turning off the water while soaping up. Since this be-
havior is slightly inconvenient, I was not surprised when our system-
atic observation revealed that only 6 percent of the students
conformed to this request. Subsequently, Michael O’Leary and I con-
ducted a simple experiment aimed at inducing a greater number of
27
people to conserve water and the energy needed to heat it. We rea-
soned that people would be more likely to turn off the shower while
soaping up if they believed other students took the request seriously.
Accordingly, we enlisted the aid of a few male students who simply
acted as models for the desired behavior. But we didn’t want people to
conform out of a fear of disapproval or punishment, so we set up the
experiment in the following way:Our model entered the shower room
(an open space consisting of eight shower nozzles spaced at regular in-
tervals) when it was empty, went to the far end, turned his back to the
entrance, and turned on the shower. As soon as he heard someone
enter, he turned off the shower, soaped up, turned it back on, briefly
rinsed off, and left the room without so much as glancing at the stu-
dent who had entered. As he left, another student (our observer) en-
tered and surreptitiously noted whether the “participant” turned off
the shower while soaping up.We found that 49 percent of the students
followed suit! Moreover, when two students simultaneously modeled
the appropriate behavior, the percentage of people obeying the sign