"Good Morning" Experiment

By Yiler Huang

female - female: the female might reply. Because from the “drop it” experiment, we can see that women are more willing to help other women and this might also apply on greetings.

female - male: the female would likely not reply or even give negative reactions. This is because they might think the men are shallow people who are romantically interested in them or they want to sell them something.

male - male: The male might reply but not likely. Because as a man I would feel really weird if a man come up to me and say good morning to me.

male - female: The male might reply, because men are traditionally taught to take care of women.

From the end results, I would say that my hypotheses was somewhat inaccurate. In the end, non of the subjects responded verbally to the male and female who said good morning to them. However, there are still interesting things that are worth discussing about.

The first interesting thing I observed was that different from our “drop it” experiment, old people gave more reactions such as nodding or looking, or even waving, at the male or female. Even though the differences are not very significant, it appears that older people are actually the most reactive groups in this experiment. In contrast, the least reactive group was the young women, which is another surprising fact because young women were the most helpful group in the previous experiment. There is also slightly more young male than female who had reactions towards female.

I believe the reason why older people were more reactive was due to the difference in society back then and today. From my experience, it seems like people from the past are more comfortable with greeting other people despite not knowing them. Younger generations on the other hand live in a society were people are more aware of the interaction between each other and they could be not very comfortable with greeting strangers on the street.

I think the reason why young males are more likely to react to female is because men are often taught to be a “gentleman” who's polite to women, and it would be considered rude to ignore a women who was greeting them. On the other hand, women were not educated to treat women especially politely, therefore, they did not give much reaction to the female.

Overall, I think the result was far away from my expectations regarding male and female. It is also hard to explain the results using the Big Five personality traits because the reactions respondents gave varied depending on the gender they were interacting with. However, this experiment still provided a new understanding about the society and a new way to view the relationships between male and female in the society.