Page 48 - The Social Animal

30 The Social Animal

zoomed to 67. Thus, in an ambiguous situation, other people can in-
duce conformity by providing us with information suggestive of what
people generally do in a given situation.
Let’s look at the cultural norm against littering. Littering does-
n’t seem like a big deal to most people—and that’s part of the prob-
lem: Most people think nothing of leaving a little trash around; but
the little trash accumulates, polluting our environment and costing
taxpayers a great deal of money. In California alone, the cost of clean-
ing up roadside litter now exceeds $120 million a year. Suppose, as
you approach your car in the parking lot of the local library, you no-
tice that someone has stuck one of those annoying fliers under your
windshield wiper. So you remove it and, without thinking, crumple
it up. The crucial question: Do you throw it on the ground or shove
it into your pocket so that you can drop it in a trash can later? The
answer: To a large extent, it depends on what other people are doing.
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In a clever experiment, Robert Cialdini and his associates placed
fliers under the windshield wipers of a number of cars and waited to
observe what each driver did when he or she discovered them. For
some people, when they first left the library, an accomplice of the ex-
perimenters walked past them, stooped down, picked up a discarded
fast-food bag that was lying in the street, and placed it in a trashcan.
In the control condition, no bag was lying on the ground; the accom-
plice simply walked past the people who were headed toward their
car. In the control condition, when the people got to their car and
noticed the flier, 37 percent threw it on the ground. In the “model-
ing” condition only 7 percent threw the flier on the ground.
In a parallel experiment researchers used a more subtle tech-
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nique of informational influence. They eliminated the human model
and, instead, manipulated the appearance of the parking lot. Specifi-
cally, when the experimenters had previously littered the parking lot
with fliers, the majority of the drivers simply followed suit—probably
thinking, “After all, if no one cares about the cleanliness of the park-
ing lot, why should I?” Interestingly enough, people were much less
likely to litter if there was one piece of litter on the ground nearby
than if the parking lot was completely free of litter. The reason is that
seeing one piece of litter reminds us of litter—and shows us that the
vast majority of people are subscribing to that norm. If the parking lot
is free of litter, most people probably do not even think about the
norm and, therefore, will be more likely to litter mindlessly.