Situated Geekery

Me, Experimenting

The Experiment

In the late seventies, the social scientist Ellen Langer performed a set of experiments about asking for small favors and receiving them.

The context is a library’s coin-operated copying machine. The subjects are people who are about to make a copy. As soon as a subject sets material onto the machine, but before the coins are inserted, an experimenter approaches. The experiment asks to go ahead of the subject, a small but real favor.

The variable in the experiment is how the experimenter asks. Here are two straightforward variants:

• Request-Only. “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine?”
• Request+Explanation. “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”

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Take a second to mull this one over. Will adding that little explanation — a lightweight but real one, a justification for the favor — work more effectively than just the bare request?

Does Request+Explanation Work Better?

I’m betting most of you say Request+Explanation does better, and you’re right.

Request-Only results in compliance 60% of the time, and Request+Because results in compliance 93% of the time. That’s quite a difference, isn’t it?

The take-home lesson hardly needs stating: you’ll do better at getting compliance if you provide a simple explanation.

I hope that this is just a reminder and not a surprise to most of you. 🙂

But We Ain’t Done Yet

I cheated, as, in fact, I often do. See, there’s a third variant:

Request+Because. “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”

This one’s kind of a mix of the first two. Like Request+Explanation, it has a clause that begins with the word because. On the other hand, there’s no more actual information provided than was already present in Request-Only. That because simply adds more words to describe the already obvious situation.

One could say Request+Because provides a placebo explanation. The because is there, alright, but it’s informationless. The explanation is a fake one.

So? What result? This time I expect a bit more shock and surprise.

The Request+Because success rate is 94% successful.

What’s This Mean?

When we interpret an experiment like this, there are lots of caveats we need to acknowledge. The size of the favor is very significant. The samples were not huge, and in any case selected from a very not-random set. And so on, and so on, blah-blah-blah.

Still, foolish GeePaws rush in where angels fear to tread.

People respond to the presence of an explanation as much or more than they respond to that explanation’s content.

Use A Because-Phrase,

Because Because-Phrases Work.