By Yiler Huang
In the modern society, people spend more time sitting on chairs than before. While sitting on a chair could be comfortable, it could result bad posture and might injure people if they are not in a good position when they are sitting at their desk. According to article Why good posture matters (Harvard Health Publishing, 2017), the author suggested that good posture can decrease the chance of getting injured and any sort of physical pain. Even though it is important to have your back straight when you are sitting and walking, people still often forget it and form a bad habit of not standing or sitting straight. Therefore, This researcher hopes he can make people straighten their backs effectively by showing them other people standing straight. If it succeeded, it could be applied on many kinds of area in the society and improve the health of everyone. The hypothesis is that when people see someone straightening their back, they will also straighten their backs. A similar phenomenon will be “contagious yawning” (a phenomenon of people yawn when seeing others yawn), in Ingroup-Outgroup Bias in Contagious Yawning by Chimpanzees Supports Link to Empathy (Campbell, 2011). The author proved that contagious yawning is a result of empathy. Based on this information, it is reasonable to believe that it might also work on adjusting postures.
While running the experiment, this researcher will walk around and stretch his back when he walks by people. The experiment takes place in people's attention and organization in their perception process. When they see a person stretching, they might focus on them because they are moving. Then, they should notice that they should also stand straighter after seeing someone stretched in front of them. This is related to the organization part of the perception process, because people will organize the person stretching and their own posture and they will adjust their posture.
This experiment was done in Expo Park and MRT station at Yuanshan. The subjects will mostly be people around the area in a variety of ages, and the whole process would be recorded. The experiment would take time around lunch time and in sunny days because it is more likely that there will be more people during sunny weathers. This researcher would find people that are standing still and stretch in front of them, and record their gender and if they also straightened their back or not. After a few test, the researcher decided it would be better if the stretching moment is consistent and contains bigger movements or else it is hard for people to pay attention to. This is because people in larger movement are easier to spot, and the stretch movements have to be consistent or else it might affect the result of the research.
All the data was collected during the afternoon of April 13, April 14, 2023. The experiment took place in the Yuanshan MRT station, and two bus stations that are close to the station. 14 footages were collected, and there were 64 subjects that were being observed. From the data, we can see that none of the subjects stretched their backs or stood straighter even though they noticed someone stretching in front of them. There could be some factors that casued the result to be different to the hypothesis, and they will be discussed in the discussion section of this research. The data is represented as a bar graph in the diagram below.
Amount of people stretched their backs compared to the ones didn't
In the end, we could see that the result of the data was very different from the hypothesis given by the researcher. The researcher believes that there might be 2 variables that, which are the attention of people and the environment. One reason could be because people were not paying attention to the action of the person in front of them. They might know that the person was there, but they might have interpreted the stretch as a meaningless action. From the perception process, we learned that an action of a person is often related to the perception inputs that were given to the person and the meaning of the input to the person. If the action of stretching was not considered meaningful, it might not affect the subject's action. Another factor could be the environment where the experiment was done in. Because the MRT station is a busy place, there might be many people around. The subjects were desensitized by the amount of people who walked in front of them, so they didn't even think or care about what other people are doing even though they were just a few steps away from them.
In the end, it is reasonable to believe that having a model doing a certain action in front of people doesn't really affect or influence their behavior. Even though the exact reasons are still unknown, but the researcher assumed that it might be because the place the experiment was crowded so people were desensitized by the environment thus they don't pay attention to people around them. This experiment proved that if someone is trying to influence other's behavior, show them directly what to do might not be the most ideal way.
Harvard Health Publishing. (2015, June 25). Why posture matters. Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/why-good-posture-matters
Campbell, M. W., & Waal, F. B. M. de. (2011). Ingroup-Outgroup Bias in Contagious Yawning by Chimpanzees Supports Link to Empathy. PLOS ONE, 6(4), e18283. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0018283