Quirkology (35 page)
Authors: Richard Wiseman
In stage two of the experiment, the researcher approached a second set of residents and asked almost exactly the same question. However, this time the sign was much, much smaller. It was just three inches square and said “BE A SAFE DRIVER.” It was a small request and almost everyone accepted. Two weeks later, the researcher returned and now asked them to display the larger sign. This time, 76 percent of people agreed to display the large ugly placard.
Why the dramatic change? Freedman and Fraser believe that agreeing to accept the first small sign had a dramatic effect on how residents saw themselves. Suddenly, they were the type of people who helped out. They were good citizens, people who were prepared to make sacrifices for the greater good. So, when it came to making a decision about the big, horrible sign, they were much more likely to say yes. It is a striking example of how to create cooperation. Get people to agree to the small, and it is much easier to persuade them not to worry about the big.
7
THE PACE OF LIFE AND OTHER QUIRKOLOGICAL ODDITIES
The Future of Quirkology
T
he potential for quirky psychology surrounds us. Take, for example, the simple act of giving a greetings card. To the uninformed eye, it may appear as if one person were sending a simple message of thanks or celebration to another. In reality, however, there is a great deal of psychology underlying the event. The very act of choosing the card says a great deal about your personality. How do I know this? Because I recently teamed up once again with Roger Highfield, the science editor at the
Daily Telegraph,
to conduct the first experiment into what people’s choice of greetings card reveals about their personality.
he potential for quirky psychology surrounds us. Take, for example, the simple act of giving a greetings card. To the uninformed eye, it may appear as if one person were sending a simple message of thanks or celebration to another. In reality, however, there is a great deal of psychology underlying the event. The very act of choosing the card says a great deal about your personality. How do I know this? Because I recently teamed up once again with Roger Highfield, the science editor at the
Daily Telegraph,
to conduct the first experiment into what people’s choice of greetings card reveals about their personality.
The experiment was conducted toward the end of 2006, and it focused on Christmas cards. More than a thousand members of the public completed a standard personality test, looked at six types of Christmas card—modern, traditional, religious, humorous, cute, and abstract—and checked off the type of card they tended to send. We discovered large relationships between personality and card type (see box). For example, people who are drawn to modern designs tend to be extraverted, easily upset, and highly unconventional. In contrast, those who prefer religious cards are more emotionally stable, sympathetic, and well organized. A very different personality profile emerged for each of the six card types, and many of the findings supported existing theories linking personality and brain functioning. For example, extroverts were drawn to relatively striking modern designs and also to humorous cards, but introverts preferred more sedate-looking traditional cards. Why should this be? Research suggests that each person’s brain has a different preset level of arousal, much as a television set has a preset volume when you switch it on. Introverts have a high preset level of arousal, and, as a result, tend to avoid situations that further arouse their already stimulated brains. Because of this, they prefer a quiet evening in with a good book to a night out on the town; they find themselves drawn to Christmas cards showing relaxing traditional scenes because these cards are not overstimulating. The opposite is true of extroverts. Since their brains have a much lower preset level of arousal, they need the continuous stimulation that being with other people gives them; their preferences in Christmas card designs are likely to be the bright and the modern as well as those that make them laugh.
We also discovered that women send about twice as many Christmas cards as men. This pattern could be explained in various ways. Men who didn’t send cards scored low on a personality dimension known as “agreeableness”—a measure of the degree to which people are critical of others—and thus might not send cards because they are less bothered about making potential recipients feel good. There again, the data also revealed that women who sent a large number of cards were highly conventional, a result suggesting that excessive card sending might not reflect a genuine concern for others but rather a need to comply with societal norms. The data also helped explain why men and women often fail to impress one another with the cards they choose. They have very different tastes; for example, 30 percent of women like modern cards versus only 16 percent of men, and only 14 percent of women like humorous cards compared to 32 percent of men.
What Does Your Choice of Greeting Card Reveal About Your Personality?Modern: Extraverted and enthusiastic about life, although somewhat anxious and easily upset, with a tendency to be more creative and unconventional than most.Humorous: Outgoing and emotionally secure, but with a distinct lack of warmth and sympathy for others.Traditional: People who prefer reading a good book to a night out on the town, with a tendency to experience extremes of emotions and to follow the rules.Abstract: Tendency to be disorganized and spontaneous, to be high strung, and to have a low need to surround themselves with others.Cute: Sympathetic, calm, and open to new experiences, with a tendency to prefer one’s own company to others.Religious: Emotionally stable, sympathetic to the needs of others, and well organized.
The experiment demonstrates the complex science lurking beneath the seemingly simplest of traditions. These exciting findings have motivated me to continue researching the topic. Next year, for example, I hope to place Santa Claus on the couch and explore the childhood experiences that cause him to feel the need to spend one night of the year rewarding good behavior around the world.
My investigation into the psychology of greeting cards is part of an ongoing program of unusual research. Some of the experiments are conducted online, and others are carried out in everyday settings. Some are small-scale affairs, others are more significant undertakings. My latest, and largest, study involved coordinating teams of researchers all over the world and having them secretly observe hundreds of people as they carried out perhaps the most mundane aspect of everyday behavior—walking down the street.
At the beginning of this book, I described my first quirkology experiment. Conducted in 1985, the study involved approaching people in a railroad station with a hidden stopwatch and having them judge how many seconds had passed since I had introduced myself. Twenty-one years later, I have just carried out my latest piece of research. Like my railroad station experiment, this study also involved unsuspecting passersby and a secret stopwatch. Unlike my earliest work, this was no small-scale affair.
At 1:00 P.M. on August 22, 2006, I found myself standing outside the General Post Office in the center of Dublin. The building’s magnificent façade has six large stone columns. As I carefully trundled a surveyor’s wheel along the pavement, I discovered that the first and fifth column were exactly sixty feet apart. Leaning against the fifth column, I pretended to be just another tourist enjoying the summer sun. In reality, I had a stopwatch hidden in my left hand and was secretly observing people as they walked in front of the building. I was on the lookout for lone pedestrians. Whenever a person walked past the first pillar, I hit the “start” button on the stopwatch. A few seconds, and exactly sixty feet later, they would pass me, and I stopped the clock. I then furtively glanced at the stopwatch and wrote down the time in the battered notebook that has accompanied me on most of my field trips. Ireland wasn’t the only focus of this strange activity that day: Researchers were making exactly the same measurements in thirty-two other countries.
The British Council has offices worldwide, each of which promotes Britain abroad through the arts, education, science, technology, and sporting events. In late 2005, I suggested that we join forces to stage a large-scale cross-cultural experiment examining the pace of life across the globe. Following from Robert Levine’s innovative research into the topic (described in chapter 6), we aimed to measure worldwide walking speeds in the twenty-first century, and, by comparing the results with Levine’s data from the early 1990s, to discover whether people are moving faster than ever before.
On the same day that I was in Dublin, our research teams around the globe ventured into city centers armed with stopwatches, measuring tape, paper, and pens.
1
Following in the footsteps of Levine, they found a busy street with a wide pavement that was flat, free from obstacles, and sufficiently uncrowded to allow people to walk along at their maximum speeds. Between 11:30 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. local time, they timed how long it took thirty-five men and thirty-five women to walk along a sixty-foot stretch of the pavement. They monitored only unaccompanied adults and ignored anyone talking on a cell phone or struggling with shopping bags.
1
Following in the footsteps of Levine, they found a busy street with a wide pavement that was flat, free from obstacles, and sufficiently uncrowded to allow people to walk along at their maximum speeds. Between 11:30 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. local time, they timed how long it took thirty-five men and thirty-five women to walk along a sixty-foot stretch of the pavement. They monitored only unaccompanied adults and ignored anyone talking on a cell phone or struggling with shopping bags.
From Paris to Prague, Singapore to Stockholm, the researchers measured the pace of life in major cities across thirty-two countries. The survey covered many of the cities documented by Levine and several not included in his 1994 study. The overall rankings for the different cities, and countries, are shown in
table 1
below.
2
table 1
below.
2
On the same day, we also sent out teams to each of the capital cities within the United Kingdom. Londoners were moving the fastest, taking an average of 12.17 seconds to cover sixty feet. Next were people in Belfast, who covered the same distance in 12.98 seconds. Third place went to Edinburgh, with an average of 13.29 seconds, and the slowest walkers were found in Cardiff, who clocked up an average time of 16.81 seconds. These differences may seem small, but they all add up. It would take Londoners approximately eleven days of continuous walking to cover the 874 miles from Lands End to John O’Groats, but people from Cardiff would take almost fifteen days to make the same journey.
By comparing the sixteen cities that were in Levine’s work and our own, we were able to determine whether the pace of life was increasing. I had traveled to Ireland because in Levine’s survey Dubliners proved to be the fastest, covering the sixty-foot distance in an average of 11.13 seconds. In 2006, the situation was roughly the same, with my results showing an average of 11.03 seconds. This pattern was repeated for a few of the other cities toward the top of Levine’s table, including Tokyo, New York, London, and Paris. But what about the slower cities in Levine’s list? In 1994, people in Bucharest took an average of 16.72 seconds, but in 2006 they completed the distance in an average of 14.36. People in Vienna were now going 2 seconds faster, with their original average time of 14.08 seconds cut to 12.06. The same pattern emerged in Sofia, Prague, Warsaw, and Stockholm. The biggest changes were
| RANK | CITY | COUNTRY |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (fastest) | Singapore | Singapore |
| 2 | Copenhagen | Denmark |
| 3 | Madrid | Spain |
| 4 | Guangzhou | China |
| 5 | Dublin | Ireland |
| 6 | Curitiba | Brazil |
| 7 | Berlin | Germany |
| 8 | New York | United States of America |
| 9 | Utrecht | Netherlands |
| 10 | Vienna | Austria |
| 11 | Warsaw | Poland |
| 12 | London | United Kingdom |
| 13 | Zagreb | Croatia |
| 14 | Prague | Czech Republic |
| 15 | Wellington | New Zealand |
| 16 | Paris | France |
| 17 | Stockholm | Sweden |
| 18 | Ljubljana | Slovenia |
| 19 | Tokyo | Japan |
| 20 | Ottawa | Canada |
| 21 | Harare | Zimbabwe |
| 22 | Sofia | Bulgaria |
| 23 | Taipei | Taiwan |
| 24 | Cairo | Egypt |
| 25 | Sana’a | Yemen |
| 26 | Bucharest | Romania |
| 27 | Dubai | United Arab Emirates |
| 28 | Damascus | Syria |
| 29 | Amman | Jordan |
| 30 | Bern | Switzerland |
| 31 | Manama | Bahrain |
| 32 | Blantyre | Malawi |
Table 1
The 32 Countries in the “Pace of Life” Experiment Ranked by Their Speed of Walking.
found in Guangzhou and Singapore, where people in both cities now take, on average, 4 seconds less to walk 60 feet than in the early 1990s, suggesting that the pace of life there is increasing around four times faster than in many parts of the world. In the early 1990s, the overall average walking speed in the sixteen countries was 13.76 seconds. In 2006, this figure had fallen to 12.49 seconds. Our global walking experiment suggested that people around the world are indeed moving faster than ever.The 32 Countries in the “Pace of Life” Experiment Ranked by Their Speed of Walking.
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