Unconscious Effects of Changes in Altitude and Goodness

A recent article entitled "Why Escalators Bring out the Best in People" by David A. Schroeder points out a strange connection between whether you have just moved physically up or down and how that effects how you will respond to choices.

Let’s say you are trying to sell cookies for a school fundraiser at the local mall, and you want to pick the ideal spot to set up your table. You’d probably look for an area with a lot of traffic.

A recent Journal of Experimental Social Psychology article by Larry Sanna and his associates at the University of North Carolina suggests a more surprising factor that you might want to consider – proximity to an escalator. Sanna and his colleagues noted that height is often used as a metaphor for virtue: moral high ground, God on high, looking up to good people, etc. If people were primed to think about height, they wondered, might people be more virtuous?

In a series of four different studies, the authors found consistent support for their predictions.

In the first study twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator.

In a second study, participants who had been taken up a short flight of stairs to an auditorium stage to complete a series of questionnaires volunteered more than 50 percent more of their time than participants who had been led down to the orchestra pit.

A third study asked participants to decide how much hot sauce to give to a participant purportedly taking part in a food-tasting study. Those who were up on the stage gave only half as much of the painfully hot sauce to the other person as did those who were sitting down in the orchestra pit.

In a final study, participants watched film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car. Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground.

Overall these studies show remarkable consistency, linking height and different prosocial behaviors -- donations, volunteering, compassion, and cooperation. While we may be inclined to think that our behaviors are the product of comprehensive thought processes, carefully weighing the pros and cons of alternatives, these results clearly show that this is not always the case. Unconscious processes are very important in determining whether we will act to help others.