Original post can be found on the Humor Code’s Huffington Post Blog.
Celebrated polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who passed away last month, never lacked targets for his writerly ire: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Gore Vidal — even Mother Teresa was not immune. But in a polarizing 2007 Vanity Fair essay, Hitchens outdid himself, taking aim at the entire female species. Women aren’t as funny as men, he declared. Case closed.
The entertainment industry seems to agree. According to the Writers Guild of America, women represent just 28 percent of all jobs in television, and 18 percent in the film industry. Such a radical imbalance might leave us all believing that if something is funny, it must’ve come from a guy. Sure enough, a recent experiment involving New Yorker cartoons found that participants of both genders misattributed funny cartoon captions to men, and the non-funny captions to women.
But lately, as the two of us travel the world in search of what makes things funny, Hitchens’ argument seems suspect. While exploring the world of stand-up comics and show-biz insiders in Los Angeles, one of funniest bits we saw involved comedienne Tig Notaro and a squeaky stool. In New York we delved into the venerable world of New Yorker cartoons, where hardly any name looms larger than that of female cartoonist Roz Chast. And while searching for laughs in the West Bank, we met Manal Awad, a woman who co-created Palestine’s first-ever political satire show, one so barbed and popular the government shut it down.
Such discoveries made us wonder: Does science back up Hitchens’ claim? Empirically, are women really less funny than men?
Sexist science
In the nascent years of humor research prior to the 1980s, studies supported Hitchens’ claim. Men were more likely than women to enjoy jokes and cartoons that researchers presented them, and differences were especially pronounced for sexual or aggressive material. The problem, however, was that later reviews of these studies found that many of the jokes used were downright sexist (“Why did the woman cross the road? Never mind that, what was she doing out of the kitchen?!”) So it wasn’t necessarily that the female participants didn’t enjoy humor; they just didn’t enjoy humor at their own expense.
These days, humor researchers are more nuanced and discerning in measuring people’s funny bones. So what have they found about women and laughter? There’s likely no one better to weigh in on the subject than Rod Martin, author of The Psychology of Humor and unofficial dean of psychological humor studies. And last summer in Boston at the International Humor Conference, an annual meeting of humor scholars from around the world, Martin didn’t mince words: “I think Hitchens is wrong.”
As Martin pointed out, in nearly all quantitative tests, from comedy-appreciation surveys to joke-telling contests to self-report questionnaires to observational experiments that measure humorous qualities in everyday life, men and women have been found to be far more alike than different in how they perceive, enjoy and create humor.
And here’s a real surprise: When you do away with all the sexist material, women tend to like dirty jokes just as much as their counterparts. So much for Hitchens’ claim that women have “a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment” than men.
The mating game
One of the few areas researchers have found gender differences in humor is in mating and dating. During courting rituals — which these days usually means Match.com profiles — men seem to be more likely concentrate on humor creation, while women concentrate on humor appreciation. For example, a 2006 study asked undergrads to rate two hypothetical romantic partners based on written descriptions. Women tended to choose the partner who would make them laugh rather than the one who would appreciate their jokes, while men preferred the opposite.
Evolutionary theorists believe this is because a sense of humor in men is seen as a sign of intelligence, social desirability and overall genetic fitness. In other words, good jokes are a guy’s version of colorful peacock plumes. Sure enough, a recent study found that male participants who did best on a cartoon caption contest tended to be more intelligent and have more sexual partners. No wonder everyone from Zach Galifianakis to Michael Bloomberg have been desperate to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.
When funny fails
The studies that do find gender differences conclude men might have a slight advantage over women in coming up with good jokes. But such research misses the fact that men’s advantage may come at a cost: Trying hard to be funny risks offending people. It was a chance that Hitchens, for example, was often willing to take.
So which gender is more likely to produce offensive humor? To find out, Peter, the scholarly half of our duo, asked his undergraduate students at the University of Colorado to take part in a joke competition. Forty-six students — 20 males, 25 females and one unidentified — each submitted a joke, all of which were then rated by another group of students from 1 to 5 in terms of funniness and offensiveness.
Working with colleagues Caleb Warren and Kathleen Vohs, plus representatives of his Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL), Peter discovered that the jokes written by men tended to be rated funnier, but the gender difference was so slight it wasn’t statistically significant. On the other hand, the guy’s jokes were significantly more likely to offend. For example, two of the top three funniest-rated jokes were written by men:
-What’s the first thing a [University of Colorado] girl does when she wakes up? Walks home.
-Penn State Football: Go in as a tight end and leave as a wide receiver.
Both jokes were rated highly offensive, with the Penn State joke coming in at an average offensiveness rating of 2.49 out of 5 — the highest of all 46 jokes.
But the funniest joke of all, with a stellar 4.49-out-5 funniness rating, came from a woman:
-How do you know you’ve been robbed by an Asian? Your homework is all finished, your computer has been upgraded, and he’s still trying to back out of your driveway.
On average, students rated this joke 1.91 out of 5 in offensiveness — still pretty insulting, but not as much as the top two written by men.
You can find the rest of the jokes and their ratings on our website.
In short, maybe guys are slightly better at cracking jokes than their better halves — but in the process, they’re more likely to rub folks the wrong way. Put another way, who’d you rather have toasting you at your wedding: Charlie Sheen or Tina Fey?
Note: I have teamed up with journalist Joel Warner for the Humor Code project, an around-the-world exploration of what makes things funny. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
With winter weather in full force, it’s a great time of year to get away to an exotic locale, and that’s exactly what we’re up to here at the Humor Code. So where are we destined? Some sun-dappled countryside? Or maybe a tropical oasis complete with white-sand beaches and swaying palm trees?
Far from it. We’re off to a land of nearly complete darkness, just a frozen stone’s throw from the Arctic Circle, a place of trolls and nihilism and bisexual lady hackers.
In other words, we’re heading to Scandinavia.
We’re doing so to explore the less-than-rosy side of humor. So far in our journeys, we’ve focused mainly on humor’s positive qualities, from its usefulness as a tool against oppressive governments to its ability to command — and earn — big money in the entertainment industry. But comedy doesn’t always turn out so well. Sometimes, jokes fail. And every now and then, a joke can fail so badly it can change your life.
Likely nowhere better illustrates this phenomenon than Denmark and Sweden. For the past seven years, the countries have been embroiled in their worst international crisis since World War II. People have been attacked in their homes by armed assailants. Newspaper offices have been retrofitted to resemble army bunkers. Citizens have gone into hiding, while others have moved away, vowing never to return. And in other countries, hundreds of thousands have mounted protests and riots targeting the two seemingly unexceptional northern European nations, conflagrations that have reportedly resulted in more than a hundred deaths.
And over what? A handful of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad — namely,12 cartoons published in Denmark in 2005, and another cartoon published in Sweden in 2007.
Many great minds have already tackled the Mohammad cartoon controversy, weighing in on everything from what it says about Scandinavian religious relations and media self-censorship and freedom of speech to how it signals the dawn of a new globalization of humor. Even the celebrated comic arts Art Spiegelman has taken a crack at it, critiquing the artistry (or lack thereof) of the cartoons themselves.
We have another goal in mind. We want to use these cartoons and their repercussions to explore humor’s dark and dangerous underbelly. Was there something unique about the cartoon medium that made these depictions of Mohammad so contentious? Would the response have been different if the artists had created formal paintings of the prophet instead? And what is it about couching such matters within visual jokes that has made both sides in the conflict– both the cartoonists and the newspapers who’ve refused to concede insensitivity, and the Islamic protestors who’ve promised bloody repercussions — so stubbornly intractable?
Finally, once we’ve figured it all, we’ll visit the strange and wonderful micronation of Ladonia. We’ve been practicing the official anthem, “Ladonia for thee I fling.”
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Joel Warner and I have teamed up to explore the science of humor on a global expedition. Our project, The Humor Code, chronicles our adventures, scientific experiments and unintentional comedy along the way.
For more about the Humor Code, check our:
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One of my tasks during my winter break (aside from research) is to plan a decision making conference that is coming to Boulder (June 27-29, 2012). Here is some information about it:
The Behavioral Decision Research in Management Conference (BDRM) is held biennially and brings together the best of behavioral research within, but not limited to, the areas of consumer behavior, organizational behavior, negotiation, managerial decision making, behavioral finance, experimental and behavioral economics, decision analysis, behavioral strategy, behavioral operations research, behavioral accounting, and medical and legal decision making.
The conference is hosted by the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder and will be held at the beautiful St. Julien Hotel.
Registration is open on the conference website, as is the call for papers.
Meet BDRM’s excellent planning committee:
Bart de Langhe
Phil Fernbach
Mathew Hayward
Peter Huang
Donnie Lichtenstein
John Lynch
Peter McGraw
Leaf Van Boven
Lawrence Williams
How I am spending my Winter “break”
Sanjay Srivastava, a University of Oregon psychology professor and author of The Hardest Science, recently posted a Brent Roberts essay that describes my life as a research professor.
Brent poses a question…
Recently, I was asked for the 17th time by a family member, “So, what are you going to do this summer?” As usual, I answered, “research.” And, as usual, I was met with that quizzical look that says, “What the heck is research anyway?”
It struck me in retrospect that I’ve done a pretty poor job of describing what research is to my family and friends. So, I thought it might be a good idea to write an open letter that tries explaining research a little better. You deserve an explanation. So do other people, like parents of students and the general public. You all pay a part of our salary, either through your taxes or the generous support of your kid’s education, and therefore should know where your money goes.
He describes what a research professor does…
Let me expand on that latter point a little before delving into what I mean by scientific research. As a professor at a major research university I am paid to do three things: Research, teaching, and service. On the teaching side of things, we often teach what appears to be an appallingly small number of classes. That said much of our teaching is done in the old-fashioned artisan-apprentice fashion—one-on-one with students. We have countless meetings throughout our week outside of the classroom working with undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers teaching them how to do research. In terms of service, we are tasked with helping to run our department and university, and with running the guilds to which we belong. I can expand on that later if you like. That said, one thing you may not have known is that at major research universities teaching and research service constitute less than 50% of our job description, combined. You may expect us to take summers and winter breaks off, but our universities are smiling as we apply ourselves to what they hired us to do, research—often when they are not even paying us. There’s nothing like free labor.
And the scientific research process….
So what do we do when we do this thing called research? I can’t speak for all types of scientists, but here are what I believe to be the basic phases of the generic research project:
- We are posed with a problem, challenge, riddle, or question that needs to be solved or answered. For example, Teresa might ask: “How can an employer help workers to see work as more meaningful?”
- We come up with a method for answering the question.
- We assemble the tools and resources needed to conduct our research.
- We run the study intended to answer our question.
- We analyze the data that comes from our study.
- We write up our findings and send the paper off to a journal where it is reviewed by several (typically three) anonymous peers who, along with the journal editor, decide whether the way we answered the question provides an adequate answer and thus provides an incremental advancement to our knowledge. If they think we did add something to the knowledge pool, then Hallelujah, our work gets published.
Of course, there is a lot more to it, and you can read all about it HERE.
Pete practicing his laugh before the big audition
It’s 7 am, we’re struggling with jetlag from flying into LAX the night before and we’re in the wilds of Burbank, California, about to audition for the world’s only team of professional laughers.
We’ve come to Los Angeles to explore the comedy culture that stretches from the film sets to the TV studios to the comedy-club circuit. The humor stakes around here are so high that live-audience sitcoms are turning to laughter ringers, folks so good at guffawing that they’re planted the audience and get everyone else cackling at the right moment.
To find those ringers, TV execs turn to Central Casting, the staffing company that’s been L.A.’s go-to place for extras and stand-ins since 1925. And that’s why we’re here, at Central Casting’s giant warehouse-size headquarters in the Valley, to meet with the woman who started it all: Lisette St. Claire.
St. Claire became the world’s first laugher wrangler thanks to The Nanny, the 1990s sitcom starring Fran Drescher. Drescher had been brutally assaulted in her own home by armed robbers, so she wasn’t keen on having random people in her studio audience. So the show asked Central Casting to provide pre-screened audiences for the show. But for St. Claire, the casting director assigned to the task, not just any laughers would do.
“I was not about to just send anybody,” she tells us. “I wanted people who were really good.”
Lisette St. Claire demonstrating mud-wrestling moves on Joel
It makes sense: From her outsized, bubbly personality to her riot of curly hair to her storied history as a one-time mud wrestler, St. Claire isn’t the sort of person to do the bare minimum for anything.
She began auditioning people, looking for dominating, infectious laughs—howls that were explosive and unique. Those who made the cut were grouped into one of three tiers: top-level Group A, second-string Group B, or “when hell freezes over” Group C. St. Claire aimed for a 50-50 mix of men and women, and she discovered those in their 40s and 50s tend to be the best. She didn’t know why; maybe it takes more life experiences, more joy and sorrow, to find things to really laugh about.
St. Claire’s formula was a hit. Her phone started ringing off the hook, with three to four shows a week planting her cacklers in their audiences. It was likely a good move. There’s a lot of research on how laughter is contagious, almost like a social disease. In 1962, parts of Tanzania were apparently stricken by a multi-year “laughter epidemic,” in which more than a thousand people supposedly suffered uncontrollable fits of laughter. (We’ll be investigating that, too; Tanzania is on the travel itinerary for next year.)
Demand for St. Claire’s laughers eventually began to wane, but lately, she says, business is picking up. It could be tied to the return of the laugh track; with competition fierce for the few comedy slots left on TV, shows are eager for any advantage they can get.
To prove her people are right for the job, St. Claire picks up her phone and dials one of her go-to laughers, one of the Group A hotshots.
“Give me a laugh,” she says, and puts him on speakerphone. Never mind that it’s 7:30 in the morning, or that the man on the other end has just been woken up. A dramatic, spontaneous cackling erupts from the phone, causing the early-bird crew working around us in the casting office to look up and smile, and in many cases start chuckling themselves:
Professional Laugher, Central Casting by HumorCode
With little warning, St. Claire turns to me: “Laugh like you’re about to pee your pants.” I try my best, feeling goofy and awkward as I cackle as loud and long as I can. It’ hard not to feel like a fool when you’re laughing at nothing whatsoever.
When I’m all laughed out, St. Claire turns to Peter. He slaps his knee and rears his head back, mouth agape. No wonder his college buddies call him “T-rex.”
Not bad, St. Claire says to us with a polite smile. “I’d put you both in Group B.”
Listen for yourself:
Joel’s laughter audition:
Joel Laughter, Central Casting by HumorCode
Peter’s laughter audition:
Pete laughter, Central Casting by HumorCode
We still think St. Claire was being kind. Do you think we should’ve made the cut?
Warm hand = warm heart?
My colleague, Lawrence Williams, did a fascinating research project, which examines how your physical experiences influences your emotional experiences.
I was skeptical when I started hearing about studies like these, but now there are so many examples , that I have come around.
What do you think?
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Williams, L.E., & Bargh, J.A. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322, 606-607.
“Warmth” is the most powerful personality trait in social judgment, and attachment theorists have stressed the importance of warm physical contact with caregivers during infancy for healthy relationships in adulthood. Intriguingly, recent research in humans points to the involvement of the insula in the processing of both physical temperature and interpersonal warmth (trust) information. Accordingly, we hypothesized that experiences of physical warmth (or coldness) would increase feelings of interpersonal warmth (or coldness), without the person’s awareness of this influence. In study 1, participants who briefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee judged a target person as having a “warmer” personality (generous, caring); in study 2, participants holding a hot (versus cold) therapeutic pad were more likely to choose a gift for a friend instead of for themselves.
My Mad Men Inspired Humor Experiment
With Joel Warner (Post on Wired)
You’ve seen it on Mad Men: The agency’s creative staff whiles away the noon hour with a liquid lunch of Old Fashioneds, then pops back into the office and whips off a whimsical Lucky Strike ad campaign that gets the masses chomping at the bit for tobacco sticks.
But does this sort of debauchery really lead to successful marketing campaigns? In particular, does it help generate humorous advertising?
Humor is considered one of the best ways to cut through a cluttered marketplace and capture the attention of jaded consumers, especially nowadays. And, as anyone who’s ever been to a comedy club can attest, alcohol and laughs go hand in hand.
We know booze can boost humor appreciation, since it lowers inhibition, decreases anxiety and increases positive mood. In a 1997 study, for example, social drinkers were asked to watch 20 minutes of goofball comedy The Naked Gun. Those who were two drinks in found O.J. Simpson’s bumbling Officer Nordberg significantly funnier than those who watched stone-cold sober.
But can alcohol fuel humor creation? Very little research has been done on the matter. To investigate, we cooked up a little experiment involving advertising creatives, a funny marketing campaign and alcohol — with an emphasis on the alcohol.
The Methodology
Our plan: Invite one of the funniest creative teams from one of New York’s largest ad agencies to a night on the town, and ask each member to sketch out funny ads, back-of-the-napkin-style, after downing some drinks. We’d foot the bill.
The team was surprisingly eager to participate and had a destination in mind: The Hurricane Club, one of the ritziest (read: priciest) juice joints in Manhattan.
Their assignment was simple: First, study the Venn diagram (above) that Pete uses to illustrate the Benign Violation Theory, his idea that humor only occurs when a violation is seen as benign. Next, polish off a cocktail and come up with a funny new Venn diagram that illustrates and promotes the concept. Then, proceed to take down another cocktail and draw another new diagram. Repeat, up to five cocktails.
With that, they were off, in a flurry of Mai Tais, Bellinis and mojitos. Several blurry hours later, we shook off the sangria and spiced rum from the results, then handed them over to the University of Colorado’s Humor Research Lab for analysis.
The Mad Men-Inspired Experiment
To be honest, there were several limitations to this exercise from the get-go. For one, the Hurricane Club, with its encyclopedic drink menu, doesn’t lend itself to a controlled experiment. For another, we didn’t expect the team’s creative directors to immediately begin heckling their underlings, demanding between swills that everybody give 110 percent, dammit.
A combination of stress and depravity ensued, and everyone went waaay over the line in terms of decency (after all, there were no stuffy corporate clients to offend). Which is why we can’t show you the most audacious diagrams, and why we’re respectfully withholding the name of the ad agency. (It could very well cost them some business.)
For a glimpse into the level of abandon we’re talking about, here’s one of the Venn diagrams from that night:
Compared to some of the others we don’t have the stomach to display here, this example is sedate. (Although if you really want to see the NSFW stuff, you can check them out on our Humor Code website. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you.)
But we digress. After each new ad they sketched, participants rated how drunk they felt — from “sober” to “shit-faced” — and how funny they considered the ad on a seven-point scale, from “slightly amusing” to “hilarious.” The data clearly show that the more drunk our mad men and women became, the funnier they believed their humor attempts to be:
But did other people agree? With the help of one of Humor Research Lab’s grad students, Julie Schiro, Pete took the 30 Venn diagrams sketched by the 10 participants from whom we obtained usable data (the results from the other two participants were too sloppy to even analyze) and submitted them to an online survey panel. There, 60 respondents rated each diagram on a seven-point scale in terms of humor and offensiveness:
As you can see from the results, the drunken advertising creatives were wildly off the mark: The Venns generally became less funny by the time our participants downed their fifth and final drink of the experiment (which only three did; most bowed out in an inebriated mess before making it all the way through). Not only that, but the diagrams also became more offensive. Take, for example, one creative director who went by the code name “Blaze.” After his third drink, he rated himself about halfway up the drunkenness scale and hatched this gem:
He gave it a 4 on the funniness scale, compared to the online-survey respondents’ rating of 3.5. Pretty similar. However, things changed as the night wore on. Blaze concocted this Venn after his fifth drink:
He rated it a 7 (i.e., hilarious). The online panel resoundingly disagreed with an average humor rating of 1.95 (i.e., slightly amusing) and an average offensiveness rating of 4.2.
The Results
In the end, the Mad Men experiment shows us that using alcohol to fuel humor creation does tend to make things funnier — but only for those making the funny. So be warned: If you hire an agency known for boozy hijinks to dream up your next big advertising campaign, get a second opinion before you reveal it to the prudish masses. In fact, we’d be happy to analyze it for you. Just don’t expect us to pick up the bar tab.
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For more about the Humor Code, check our:
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More about my trip to Los Angeles. (Previously posted at Humor Code)
Here at the Humor Code world headquarters, we’ve long struggled with the concept of stand-up comedy. Of all the types of humor to study, it’s likely the most obvious, the most discussed, the most written about, the most filmed. Folks far more experienced than us have already deconstructed the subject every which way. So you might be wondering, what’s left to say about it?
Then again, it’s not as if we can ignore the matter. After all, stand-up is one of America’s greatest cultural inventions. Born from vaudeville theaters and minstrel shows, refined along the Borscht Belt and disseminated to the world thanks to The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, and Seinfeld, stand-up flavors comedy the world over.
Furthermore, there’s something fascinating about the stark purity of the genre: just a comedian and an audience; no backstory, no sets, no editors or producers or censors, a place where you either score a laugh or you don’t. It’s comedy boiled down to basics, the perfect petri dish for why we find things funny.
Plus, when you think about it, there are lots of elements within the standup scene that are taken for granted, and it’s high time those concepts are subjected to scientific rigor. Such as, what makes a good standup star? Is it inherent hilarity, tireless training, charismatic presence, life experiences—or something else entirely? And is the current method of finding the next Chris Rock or Louis C.K. the best method of scouting for and enhancing these qualities?
And what about comedy clubs? What makes for a “good room” versus a bad one? And let’s not forget all those profanities. Does a set full of F-bombs really make bits funnier?
To answer these questions and more, we clearly had to visit one place: Los Angeles. Nowhere else is stand-up so ingrained in the local geography, week in and week out. On Monday nights, there’s the Tiger Lilly Comedy Show at the Hollywood Studio Bar & Grill. On Tuesdays, it’s Comedy Bang Bang at the UCB Theatre. Wednesday it’s Comedy Meltdown. The list goes on: Improv Hollywood, the Comedy Store, the Goundlings Theatre and School. If you want to be a stand-up comic, sooner or later all roads run through L.A.
And that’s where we are this week. We’ll be comparing notes with comics young and old, shadowing comedy scouts for the big talent agencies, and overdosing on overpriced comedy-club drink minimums. We have a few other experiments and escapades planned, too; stay tuned for the gory details.
Oh yeah, we’ll also be taking a little road trip into the desert. That’s right: We’re going to Vegas, baby. But don’t worry. We’ll be spilling the dirty details on what goes down, all in the name of science. For Humor Code swingers like us, what happens in Vegas definitely won’t stay in Vegas.
The best job in the world
As part of my Humor Code project, I am headed to Los Angeles to examine comedy on stage…
Here is a glimpse of some of the things Joel Warner and I are going to do:
-Attend Comedy Meltdown at the Nerdist Theater.
-Tour Hollywood’s Comedy Store
-Attend the Neal Brennan Show at the Westside comedy theater.
-Conduct a Swingers’ style road trip to meet comedian George Wallace.
-Sit on Greg Dean’s beginner stand-up class and get a private comedian lesson from him.
-Meet Joe Wengert of Upright Citizen’s Brigade and take an improv training class.
-Attend UCB’s Comedy Bang Bang.
-Catch up with our pal, Alonzo Bodden.
Send suggestions of other things we should do. To keep track of our adventures, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
With Joel Warner (Cross posted on The Humor Code’s Psychology Today blog)
With the holidays upon us, we’re taking a break from deconstructing what makes things funny and instead pondering the tradition that is Thanksgiving. We’re not talking about gathering with friends and family to express gratitude for what we have been provided. We’re referring to the national customs of eating to the point of pain on Turkey Day, then turning shopping into a blood sport on Black Friday.
Neither makes much sense on the surface. While it’s one thing to overeat on special occasions, it’s quite another to gorge oneself, as many of us do on Thanksgiving. The average American consumes 3,000 calories and 229 grams of fat at the Thanksgiving table. To put that in perspective, a fit individual would have to run for four hours to burn off those extra calories.
Somehow, despite the daylong orgy of fatty food, many Americans nevertheless manage to wake up before dawn the following day prepared to battle over discounts on laptops and talking dolls. The insanity and violence of Black Friday sales have long been the stuff of news headlines. Yet, despite the attention, millions of people amazingly continue to participate in the shopping frenzy each year, to the point of injury or worse.
What exactly is going on here? Is all that tryptophan going to our heads, turning us into gluttonous, blood-thirsty zombies?
The explanation is likely more simple. One of the hallmarks of psychological science is that we are influenced by the actions of others — often more so than we’d like to admit. Sometimes we’re impelled to take positive actions, such as switching to reusable bags or cutting down on littering. Other times, social influence can be quite negative. When it comes to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, unfortunately, the influences skew more toward bad than good.
Thanksgiving Feasting
When those around us succumb to indulgences, we’re more likely to succumb as well. It’s why obesity was recently found to spread from one friend to another, like a disease. The phenomenon is so formidable that a person packing on pounds in one city can influence a friend’s waistline hundreds of miles away. Likewise, the person across from you at the Thanksgiving table can unduly influence your decision to put in for a third serving of stuffing.
But that’s not all. The chitchat around the table is also a culprit. While conversation and storytelling can result in a wonderful experience, they impair self-control.
Research has shown that others tend to distract us from paying attention to what we are eating. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating, found that distractions lead people to ignore the most important eating cue-hunger. In our favorite study, for instance, people eating soup from bottomless bowls failed to realize they never finished, no matter how much they ate. As a result, they consumed 73 percent more than those who ate soup from a normal bowl.
Black Friday Door Busters
Social triggers may also play a role in the mob mentality that pervades Black Friday. That includes the concept of scarcity-the frenzy-inducing promise of “while supplies last.” It turns Black Friday shopping into a physical and mental achievement, one that requires us to outwait, outwit, and outrun our fellow shoppers in order to “win” (i.e., buy something).
As Texas A&M marketing professor Suresh Ramanathan notes, “I have always thought of it as a competitive sport-the scarcity primes a competitive motivation so that people will go to absurd lengths to get the best deal or snap up something before others can get to it.” Consider how the hot toy each holiday season becomes hotter and hotter as stores begin to run out.
Even worse, the Black Friday routine most retailers have adopted-locking entrances until the exact minute of opening time, inadequate staffing, no crowd management-means consumers are primed to act in the worst ways, recklessly charging into stores as soon as they are allowed.
Once one person begins running, everyone follows course. It’s the concept of social proof (“If somebody else is in a hurry, there must be some urgency, so I should hurry, too”). And once everyone is running toward the same destination, the situation turns bad quickly. Contrary to media interpretations, research has found that most crowd disasters aren’t “panics,” such as when everyone tries to flee a building. Instead, the majority of crowd calamities are associated with “crazes,” the phenomenon of everyone rushing toward the same thing they all want.
Beating the Crowd (Mentality)
Does this mean we are helpless to the whims of the crowd on Thanksgiving and Black Friday? Not necessarily, since we can always exert self-control. On Thanksgiving, think smaller plates of food, as advocated by Wansink’s small plate movement: You’ll clean your plate faster and then stop and think about how hungry you are before going for seconds or thirds. If you’re just digging into one gigantic mound of chow, you may never take a break to check in with your body’s hunger queues.
As for Black Friday, shop online. After all, more online retailers are now matching or beating the best Black Friday deals of the big-box stores. And even if some in-store prices are better than those on the web, ask yourself this: How much is your time worth? Are cold, early-morning hours spent waiting in line with potentially violent shopaholics really worth saving $50 on that flat-screen TV?
Sure, lots of other folks seem to think so. But just because other people believe something doesn’t make it true.
