Chapter 51 Gloves, briefcases, and the female van driver who disappeared

For the past 25 years, Professor John Trinkaus of the City University of New York has devoted his academic career to scientifically observing the everyday lives of ordinary people.Trinkaus has published nearly a hundred academic papers, which shows the wide range of research topics.He has visited many train stations in order to observe the color of sneakers worn by men and women (79% of men choose white sneakers, but only 34% of women choose white sneakers); The number of times weather forecasters on the Internet claim their forecasts are very accurate and the number of times they are actually accurate (only 49% of their forecasts are actually accurate); he has gone to the poor areas of the city to record the number of people wearing baseball caps backwards (It is decreasing at a rate of 10% per year); he has also counted the number of times the interviewees answered the question with "yes" (yes) in the TV talk show, hoping to outline the trend of language used in the affirmative answer in his analysis Among the 419 questions, "yes" (yes) was used 53 times, "exactly" (exactly) was used 117 times, and "absolutely (completely correct) was used 249 times".

None of Trincaus' surveys of sneakers, weather forecasts, how to wear baseball caps, and the use of "yes" apparently had a clear moral.Some of his other research, however, has profound implications, especially his work on the amazing predictability of human nature.Nettlinks asked hundreds of students to choose an odd number from 10 to 50, and found that most of the students chose 37.He asked everyone to choose an even number from 50 to 100, and most of the people chose 68.Trinkaus then took this research into the real world, asking 100 people who had a combination lock briefcase to tell him the combination number of the combination lock.Ah, it turns out that about 75% of people have not changed the factory settings of the combination lock, and can open their briefcase with the combination of numbers 0-0-0. (In Pavilion, physicist Richard Feynman mentions using such predictability to read highly classified documents when he was involved in developing the atomic bomb at the U.S. military base at Los Alamos He once managed to open a colleague's safe just by trying different combinations of numbers he thought a physicist might use. The safe's combination was 27-18-28, which was apparently based on mathematics The constant e=2.71828. Another time, Feynman found that no one had changed the factory default value of the largest safe in the base, which meant that even a thief with little skill could open this important safe in a few minutes. )

Of all Trincaus's studies, my favorite one is included in a little-known paper entitled "On the Disappearing Personal "Properties"—Gloves."At the beginning of the paper, Trincaus mentioned that many of his personal items would disappear for no reason, such as a sock, umbrella or a glove.He then went on to say that the problem of missing umbrellas has been satisfactorily resolved because he bought several cheap umbrellas from street vendors (he observed that the prices of umbrellas sold by vendors were 50% more expensive than usual on rainy days) , however, he was not happy to solve the glove problem in the same way.Trincaus hoped to thoroughly understand the mystery of the disappearance of the glove, so he did a ten-year follow-up study. He carefully observed whether the glove that disappeared belonged to the left hand or the right hand, and found that the number of left-hand gloves that disappeared mysteriously It turned out to be three times the number of right-hand gloves.This made him suspect that he might have taken off his right glove first and put it in his pocket, and then he took off his left glove and put it on top of his right glove.If this is the case, the left hand glove will be closer to the edge of the pocket, so it is more likely to fall out of the pocket while walking.Trincaus' work on the disappearing glove has inspired other researchers to explore similar themes. In 2005, three researchers at the Mark Farren Burnett Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Megan.Lyme, Margaret Hallard and Campbell Aiken performed an experiment to find out why teaspoons so often disappear in communal kitchens (or, as they used in their scientific research paper on the topic phrasing to answer that age-old question: "Where did all those damn teaspoons go?").The Jia research team secretly marked 70 teaspoons, and then put them in the institute's 8 public kitchens. In the following 5 months, they tracked the dynamics of the teaspoons.The results showed that 80 per cent of the teaspoons mysteriously disappeared during this time, with half of them gone within the first 81 days.According to another survey, 36 per cent said they had stolen a teaspoon at least once in their life, and 18 per cent admitted to having stolen it in the past 12 months.The questionnaire data can show that the disappearing teaspoon is not being sucked into another dimension "Life-inhabited planet), there is a more realistic interpretation: people stole them.The researchers also mentioned that if the Institute's teaspoon disappearance rate was multiplied by the entire working population of Melbourne, then 18 million teaspoons would mysteriously disappear every year in the city of Melbourne alone.If these vanishing teaspoons were connected end to end, they could circle the coastline of Mozambique.Unlike the "disappearing glove" study done by Trincaus, the "disappearing teaspoon" has begun to be replicated by researchers around the world. French scholars also recently conducted a study. The results showed that in a large restaurant, only 1800 teaspoons were lost in half a year.

Stolen teaspoons remind us of Trincaus's research on dishonesty and antisocial behavior.As we will see later in this chapter, many researchers interested in this type of behavior are looking at more serious acts of stealing or selfishness.Trincaus has managed to develop a unique research approach that focuses on smaller-scale social violations, such as someone buying more than ten items while using the express checkout lane at the supermarket, or Parking in places where parking is prohibited.His research has yielded quite startling findings showing how often these violations occur, how they can paint a picture of the moral decay of society as a whole, and how these violations relate to female truck drivers .

In 1993, Trincaus and his research team visited a large supermarket in the northeastern United States.They surreptitiously observed customers in 75 different situations for 15 minutes each.They carefully counted how many people bought ten or more items and still checked out in the "ten or less" fast lane.In order to ensure the scientific validity of this study, they observed customers at different times of the day for several weeks, and only recorded customer behavior when the supermarket opened more than two normal checkout lanes (which means that customers are completely Optionally use the correct checkout lane).The results showed that 85 percent of customers who checked out in the fast lane violated the rules because they had more than ten items in their baskets. In 2002, Trincaus repeated the experiment in the same supermarket, and the results showed that the proportion of customers who violated the rules had risen to 93%.If calculated at this rate of change, by 2011, there will be no customers who purchased less than ten items among customers using the fast track.

After the 1993 experiment, Trincaus noticed another new suspicious behavior.Several of the fast-lane shoppers split their purchases into groups of ten and placed them individually on the conveyor belt to check out.One such customer successfully used this opportunistic method to check out 29 items in the fast lane.After discovering this new deception, Trincaus realized it could be used to determine which types of people were most likely to violate social norms.Using his usual method of observation, Trincaus had members of his team tail the men to supermarket car parks and surreptitiously note their gender and car model.The results showed that about 80 percent of the offenders were female van drivers.This isn't the first time Trincaus has found female truck drivers to be particularly likely to engage in antisocial behavior. In 1999, he counted and categorized speeding near schools and found that 96 percent of female truck drivers speeded, but only 86 percent of male truck drivers violated the speed limit. "In the same year, he also counted the number of drivers who did not come to a full stop at a T-junction stop sign. Overall, 94 per cent of drivers failed to obey the traffic sign, but female truck drivers had a 99 per cent breach. In 2001, he spent 32 hours recording 200 violations of motor vehicles entering pedestrian-only intersections, and found that 40% of the cases were related to the same type of people, yes, you guessed it, female truck drivers A year later, he counted people parking in fire-fighting no-parking zones at a shopping center and found that the most unruly drivers were female truck drivers, accounting for about 35 percent of all violations.

Trincaus offers two explanations for the experimental data.First, he suspects that "women truck drivers are inadvertently bringing the concept of empowerment from the workplace into everyday life." According to this interpretation, women are still adjusting to the power they have gained in society, so may unconsciously think Go beyond men's past behaviors like speeding, parking in no-parking zones, or turning a blind eye to traffic signs.Second, Trincaus points out, these female truck drivers may be at the forefront of society's moral decline, and their behavior is a harbinger of what people may do in the future.