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Social Experiment - Responsibility of Strangers



This experiment explores common situations to test to see what variables are more likely to elicit a protective response from strangers. A normal-looking woman leaves her belongings unattended at the beach and a man (part of the experiment) comes by and steals her Ipod and speakers. No one really helps, though they notice, but if the normal-looking woman makes small talk with people nearby, they are much more likely to respond to the thief.
Switch the normal-looking woman for someone much more attractive and things change. She doesn't have to even make small talk - people step in to react when the thief steals her things but the difference is they all noticed her more... because we notice beautiful people, we're more aware of them when they're near us. Take that same beautiful woman, though, and tell her to come on to another woman's husband a bit... she's suddenly not someone to just observe, she becomes a threat and is treated quite differently.

We've been talking about Attribution theory, how we categorize people and assume qualities they have based on how they fit into our schemas, or prior categories of knowledge. Beautiful people are considered differently - we assume if they are beautiful then they are also all the other positive qualities: moral, intelligent, honest, caring, good, etc.

We have just finished our own social experiment testing male photos and female photos and asked our volunteers (both male and female) to rate them in order from the ones they beleived would be most friendly to least. We were somewhat surprised that both men and women rated the male photographs in a similar manner (results were very much the same) but the order men rated the women was quite different (surprisingly so for a few photos) than the way women ordered them. Men and woman obviously categorize people visually by different criteria. The most attractive looking women were rated as very friendly by men but rated in the middle by women. Very attractive women seem to be read as a threat by other women, as is the example in one scenario of this video. Maybe is there an example here of an Attribution theory error - the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy... where the woman treated the beautiful woman (in the experiment) based on her initial impression of her and then looked for behaviour from the woman to confirm that initial impression.

What do you think now that we've found some evidence that men and women categorize others differently?

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