On a recent podcast, author Robert Cialdini described a French social experiment involving a young man and a whole lot of female shoppers who did not know they were part of psychological research. The young man's job was to record his success rate for his direct approach to the ladies roaming a shopping mall: "Excuse me, can I have your phone number so that I can call you later for a date?"
All over the mall, this approach garnered a phone number 13.5% of the time.
However, the researchers discovered there was one particular place in this mall where his success rate shot up to 24%. Nearly double!
Where was a young lady browsing who was twice as likely as others to give a handsome stranger her phone number?
A flower shop.
The researchers concluded that the presence of flowers predisposed a woman to thoughts of romance. So when a young man approached and requested her number, she was much more open to taking a chance than if he had approached her while she was shopping for shoes or enjoying an overpriced pretzel.
The point is that our environments exert much more influence over us than we are aware of, often in extremely subtle but powerful ways.
Cialdini now has me contemplating this fact and its implications for the appearance of my classroom. Are there ways for my room to predispose students toward learning?
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