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Exposure to altruism quotes and tipping behavior in a restaurant
International Journal of Hospitality Management 32 (2013) 299–301
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
International Journal of Hospitality Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhosman
Research note
Exposure to altruism quotes and tipping behavior in a restaurant Céline Jacob a , Nicolas Guéguen a,∗ , Renzo Ardiccioni b , Cécile Sénémeaud c a
Université de Bretagne-Sud, IUT de Vannes- Département TC, 8 rue Montaigne, BP 561 - 56017 Vannes, France Université du Maine, IUT de laval, 52 rue des docteurs Calmette et Guérin, 53020 Laval Cedex 9, France c NIMEC - Normandie Innovation Management Entreprise Consommation – EA969, Université de Caen, UFR de Psychologie, Esplanade de la Paix, 14032 Caen Cedex, France b
a r t i c l e Keywords: Tipping Restaurant Altruism quotes Priming
i n f o
a b s t r a c t Some studies have shown that exposure to fortuitous information can influence individuals’ behavior. In this study, customers in two restaurants were exposed, or not, to an altruism-related quote written on their bill. A significant increase in tipping behavior was found from both male and female patrons who had been exposed to the altruism quotes. Activation spreading theory was used to explain these results. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
“Life’s most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?” This is one of the well-known altruism quotes delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., and many further altruism-related quotes or proverbs are found in all the cultures of the world. One key issue is to know whether exposure to such quotes and proverbs can lead to altruism. Research on priming has demonstrated that the activation of a concept can exert an influence on subsequent information processing or behavior. Bargh et al. (1996) found that participants primed with words characteristic of the elderly stereotype (e.g., traditional, retired) walked more slowly than those of a control group when leaving the experiment. They also found that participants primed with the concept of rudeness interrupted the experimenter more quickly and frequently than did participants primed with the concept of politeness. Similarly, Banaji et al. (1993) found that participants exposed to sentences describing stereotyped behavior of dependence (e.g., “can’t make decisions”) rated a female target who performed identical behavior as a male target as more dependent, whereas after exposure to aggression primes (e.g., “threatens other people”), participants rated a male target as more aggressive than a female target. To explain the means by which mental representations can shape social behavior, theorists have hypothesized mental structures consisting of interconnected information or attributes (Bargh, 1994). The main assumption is the spreading of activation: the activation of one concept is assumed to spread along a network of meaningfully associated information. Activating the concept of gender, for example, would bring into play the
∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (C. Jacob), [email protected] (N. Guéguen), [email protected] (R. Ardiccioni), [email protected] (C. Sénémeaud). 0278-4319/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2012.03.003
implicit knowledge structure of gender-linked traits, stereotypes, and norms of behavior. Research on helping behavior has shown that exposure to prosocial verbal content is associated with greater helping behavior. Greitemeyer (2009a) found that exposure to prosocial song lyrics, contrasted to neutral songs by the same artists, increased prosocial thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In a related study, Greitemeyer (2009b) found that listening to songs with prosocial lyrics fostered interpersonal empathy and that this empathy mediated later prosocial behavior, thus increasing helping behavior. Hence, in a laboratory setting, participants who listened to songs with prosocial lyrics were more favorably disposed toward a confederate who asked them to donate 2D to a nonprofit organization (Greitemeyer, 2009b). Recently, Jacob et al. (2010) found that restaurant patrons exposed to songs with prosocial lyrics compared to songs with neutral lyrics gave more tips to employees. However, in that study, the difference in tipping behavior could perhaps be explained not only by differences in the lyrics per se but also by variation in structural components of the music that were not controlled, such as tempo or style. Thus, the question remains whether exposure to prosocial information can really influence helping behavior and, by extension, tipping behavior. This evaluation was carried out by exposing restaurant patrons to quotes associated with altruism. Previous research has shown that information written on the bill can positively affect patrons’ tipping behavior: employees increase their tips when writing “thank you” (Rind and Bordia, 1995) or a patriotic message (Seiter and Gass, 2005) on the backs of checks or when drawing a smiling face or a picture of the sun on the check (Guéguen and Legohérel, 2000; Rind and Bordia, 1996). In this experiment, quotes associated that were or were not associated with altruism were written on the customers’ bill. It was hypothesized that exposure to altruism content would be associated with more generous tipping behavior.
300
C. Jacob et al. / International Journal of Hospitality Management 32 (2013) 299–301
1. Method 1.1. Participants The participants were 349 restaurant customers (217 males and 132 females) who were randomly assigned to three groups. All of them were seated alone at a table in two restaurants of two medium-size cities (both of about 75,000 inhabitants) in a very attractive spot in France. The restaurants proposed a menu offering mainly seafood (fish and shellfish). 1.2. Procedure Five waitresses (19- to 26-year-olds), regularly employed, were used as confederates in this experiment. However, they were not aware of the goals of our experiment, and they had not received any information about previous studies on tipping behavior. The experiment was conducted every day for four weeks (excluding Saturdays and Sundays) during the lunch hour because there were a sufficient number of patrons who were alone at that time (the restaurants where the experiment was carried out used to receive many commercial travelers who lunched alone). The waitresses were instructed to act as they always did. At the end of the meal, when the customers asked their waitress for the bill, she was instructed to consult a form with the order of the dishes associated with the table. This random distribution was done for each table. In this experiment, the waitress pressed a till key that added (or not, for the control group) a quote at the end of the bill. The altruism quote was a well-known quote by the French writer George Sand: “A good turn never goes amiss” (in French, Un bienfait n’est jamais perdu). The neutral quote was a Latin proverb: “He who writes reads twice” (in French, Celui qui écrit, lit deux fois). In the control condition, no quote was written on the bill. The quotes were printed in French because the experiment was conducted during the winter period where it was found in a previous study (Jacob et al., 2010) conducted in these two restaurants that most of the customers were French. The waitress folded the bill and placed it on the plate with, as usual, one sweet on the bill. She was instructed to put the plate on the customer’s table with a smile and to say “Here is the bill Sir/Madam” before leaving the table. After the customer had left the restaurant, the waitress came to the table and recorded how the customer had behaved in a notebook, namely, whether he/she left a tip (DV1) and the amount of money that was given (DV2). 2. Results In France, tipping is not expected because French legislation stipulates that a 12% service charge be included in the prices listed on a menu. Traditionally, when customers leave a tip in a restaurant, they put some money (coins or notes) directly on the bill plate or on the table. This is done whether the customers paid the bill by cash, check, or credit card. Thus, according to previous studies on tipping behavior conducted in France (Guéguen, 2002; Guéguen and Jacob, 2005, 2011; Guéguen and Legohérel, 2000; Jacob and Guéguen, 2012; Jacob et al., 2009, 2010) or in the Netherlands (Van Baaren et al., 2003) the numbers of customers who left a tip among the total number of customers waited on was the first dependent variable, whereas the amount of money left by the customers as a tip was the second dependent variable. A preliminary data analysis was conducted on the results recorded by the waitresses and revealed no interaction effect between the dependent variables and the waitresses. No main effect of patrons’ gender or significant interaction effect between the experimental conditions and the gender of the patrons were found both with the numbers of
Table 1 Percentage of tippers and monetary value of tips received (in euros) according to experimental conditions and customer gender. Measure
Altruism quote
Neutral quote
No quote
Number of tippers Amount of tip
47.0% (55/117) 0.56 (0.74)a
29.8% (34/114) 0.26 (0.48)
38.8% (34/118) 0.24 (0.44)
a
Mean; standard deviation in brackets.
customers who left a tip and with the amount of money left. Thus, the data were combined across waitresses and patron’s gender, and the results of the analysis are presented in Table 1. Using the number of participants who gave a tip, a chi-square independent test with the 3 experimental condition and tipping behavior as the dichotomous dependent variable was performed and revealed a main effect of experimental condition on tipping behavior (2 (2, N = 349) = 10.7, p = .005, r = .17). Further comparison revealed that the altruism quote condition was significantly different from the neutral quote condition (2 (1, N = 231) = 7.20, p = .007, r = .17) and the no-quote control condition (2 (1, N = 235) = 8.26, p = .004, r = .18) whereas the neutral quote condition was not significantly different from the no-quote control condition (2 (1, N = 232) = 0.06, p = .80, r = .02). With the amount of tip left by the patrons a one-way ANOVA for 3 independent groups was performed. A main effect of experimental condition was found (F(2, 314) = 9.10, p < .001, 2p = .06) with post hoc tests revealing that the altruism quote condition was significantly different from the neutral quote condition (LSD test, p = .001) and the no-quote control condition (LSD test, p = .003) whereas the neutral quote condition was not significantly different from the no-quote control condition (LSD test, p = .81). 3. Discussion The present findings showed that exposure to altruism quotes was associated with an increase in patrons’ tipping behavior. Customers gave tips more often to a waitress when they were exposed to an altruism quote and, when they did so, they gave her a larger amount of money. This effect was found for both male and female patrons. Such results exhibit a methodological and theoretical interest. Previous studies showed that exposure to songs with prosocial lyrics was associated with greater helping behavior (Greitemeyer, 2009a,b, 2011) and tipping behavior (Jacob et al., 2010). It was stated, however, that other variables could possibly help explain this altruism effect, such as tempo, style of music, etc. In our experiment, exposure to altruistic information was clearly associated with an increase in tipping behavior. These results confirmed that activation of a concept has an influence on subsequent information processing or behavior (Banaji et al., 1993; Bargh et al., 1996). The spreading activation theory (Anderson, 1983; Bargh, 1994) seems to provide a reasonable explanation for our results. According to this theory, information is encoded into cognitive units that form an interconnected network, and the retrieval of information is performed by spreading activation throughout this network. Hence, when someone is exposed to information, such as words, the network where this information is encoded is activated, and this individual can retrieve not only the concept associated with the visual and/or oral cue, but also further cognitive units that become available. In our study, the altruistic quote probably activated the concept of altruism which in turn activated further related concepts such as helping, solidarity, and generosity. Individuals in our experiment probably acted in such a way as to be congruent with such concepts stored in their memory, which may explain why they gave more tips to the waitresses. Thus it could be interesting in further studies to examine patrons’ thoughts and feelings associated
C. Jacob et al. / International Journal of Hospitality Management 32 (2013) 299–301
with quotes used in this experiment and to examine their relation with tipping behavior. This study confirms the validity of studying the influence of information that appears on customers’ bill (Guéguen and Legohérel, 2000; Rind and Bordia, 1995, 1996; Seiter and Gass, 2005). Our findings have some practical interest for restaurants’ employees who want to increase their incomes by increasing the tips left by their customers. Adding an altruism quote is an easyto-use method that could increase significantly their tip-generated income. Of course, this experiment had a number of limitations. Waitresses were not informed of the real objective of the study and of previous research on this topic. However, they may have unconsciously behaved differently, depending on the experimental condition, which in turn could have influenced the patrons’ tipping behavior. Additionally, only lone diners were tested in this experiment, and the generalization to group diners remains in question. Similarly, only the tipping behavior toward waitresses was tested, and it would be important to test tipping behavior toward waiters as well. Only two quotes were examining in this study and the generalization of the finding to all quotes with an altruistic content still remains in question. It could be interesting in further studies to examine if variation in altruistic content could be associated with variation in customer tipping behavior. References Anderson, J.R., 1983. A spreading activation theory of memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 22, 261–295. Banaji, M.R., Hardin, C., Rothman, A.J., 1993. Implicit stereotyping in person judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (2), 272–281.
301
Bargh, J.A., 1994. The four horsemen of automaticity: awareness, intention, efficiency, and control in social cognition. In: Wyer Jr., R.S., Srull, T.K. (Eds.), Handbook of Social Cognition, vol. 1, 2nd ed. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 1–40. Bargh, J.A., Chen, M., Burrows, L., 1996. Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (2), 230–244. Greitemeyer, T., 2009a. Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on prosocial thoughts, affect, and behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (1), 186–190. Greitemeyer, T., 2009b. Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on prosocial behavior: further evidence and a mediating mechanism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (11), 1500–1511. Greitemeyer, T., 2011. Effects of prosocial media on social behavior: when and why does media exposure affect helping and aggression? Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, 251–255. Guéguen, N., 2002. The effect of a joke on tipping when it is delivered at the same time as the bill. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 32, 1955–1963. Guéguen, N., Jacob, C., 2011. Enhanced female attractiveness with use of cosmetics and male tipping behavior in restaurants. Journal of Cosmetic Science. 62, 283–290. Guéguen, N., Jacob, C., 2005. The effect of touch on tipping: an evaluation in a French’s bar. International Journal of Hospitality Management 24, 295–299. Guéguen, N., Legohérel, P., 2000. Effect on tipping of barman drawing a sun on the bottom of customers’ checks. Psychological Reports 87, 223–226. Jacob, C., Guéguen, N., 2012. The Effect of physical distance between patrons and servers on tipping. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research 36, 25–31. Jacob, C., Guéguen, N., Boulbry, G., 2010. Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on tipping behavior in a restaurant. International Journal of Hospitality Management 29 (4), 761–763. Jacob, C., Guéguen, N., Boulbry, G., Ardicioni, R., 2009. Waitresses’ facial cosmetics and tipping: a field experiment. International Journal of Hospitality Management 29, 188–190. Rind, B., Bordia, P., 1995. Effect of server’s “Thank you” and personalization on restaurant tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25 (9), 745–751. Rind, B., Bordia, P., 1996. Effect on restaurant tipping of male and female servers drawing a happy, smiling face on the backs of customers’ checks. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26 (3), 218–225. Seiter, J.S., Gass, R.H., 2005. The effect of patriotic messages on restaurant tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35 (6), 1197–1205. Van Baaren, R.B., Holland, R.W., Steenaert, B., Van Knippenberg, A., 2003. Mimicry for money: behavioral consequences of imitation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39, 393–398.
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
International Journal of Hospitality Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhosman
Research note
Exposure to altruism quotes and tipping behavior in a restaurant Céline Jacob a , Nicolas Guéguen a,∗ , Renzo Ardiccioni b , Cécile Sénémeaud c a
Université de Bretagne-Sud, IUT de Vannes- Département TC, 8 rue Montaigne, BP 561 - 56017 Vannes, France Université du Maine, IUT de laval, 52 rue des docteurs Calmette et Guérin, 53020 Laval Cedex 9, France c NIMEC - Normandie Innovation Management Entreprise Consommation – EA969, Université de Caen, UFR de Psychologie, Esplanade de la Paix, 14032 Caen Cedex, France b
a r t i c l e Keywords: Tipping Restaurant Altruism quotes Priming
i n f o
a b s t r a c t Some studies have shown that exposure to fortuitous information can influence individuals’ behavior. In this study, customers in two restaurants were exposed, or not, to an altruism-related quote written on their bill. A significant increase in tipping behavior was found from both male and female patrons who had been exposed to the altruism quotes. Activation spreading theory was used to explain these results. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
“Life’s most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?” This is one of the well-known altruism quotes delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., and many further altruism-related quotes or proverbs are found in all the cultures of the world. One key issue is to know whether exposure to such quotes and proverbs can lead to altruism. Research on priming has demonstrated that the activation of a concept can exert an influence on subsequent information processing or behavior. Bargh et al. (1996) found that participants primed with words characteristic of the elderly stereotype (e.g., traditional, retired) walked more slowly than those of a control group when leaving the experiment. They also found that participants primed with the concept of rudeness interrupted the experimenter more quickly and frequently than did participants primed with the concept of politeness. Similarly, Banaji et al. (1993) found that participants exposed to sentences describing stereotyped behavior of dependence (e.g., “can’t make decisions”) rated a female target who performed identical behavior as a male target as more dependent, whereas after exposure to aggression primes (e.g., “threatens other people”), participants rated a male target as more aggressive than a female target. To explain the means by which mental representations can shape social behavior, theorists have hypothesized mental structures consisting of interconnected information or attributes (Bargh, 1994). The main assumption is the spreading of activation: the activation of one concept is assumed to spread along a network of meaningfully associated information. Activating the concept of gender, for example, would bring into play the
∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (C. Jacob), [email protected] (N. Guéguen), [email protected] (R. Ardiccioni), [email protected] (C. Sénémeaud). 0278-4319/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2012.03.003
implicit knowledge structure of gender-linked traits, stereotypes, and norms of behavior. Research on helping behavior has shown that exposure to prosocial verbal content is associated with greater helping behavior. Greitemeyer (2009a) found that exposure to prosocial song lyrics, contrasted to neutral songs by the same artists, increased prosocial thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In a related study, Greitemeyer (2009b) found that listening to songs with prosocial lyrics fostered interpersonal empathy and that this empathy mediated later prosocial behavior, thus increasing helping behavior. Hence, in a laboratory setting, participants who listened to songs with prosocial lyrics were more favorably disposed toward a confederate who asked them to donate 2D to a nonprofit organization (Greitemeyer, 2009b). Recently, Jacob et al. (2010) found that restaurant patrons exposed to songs with prosocial lyrics compared to songs with neutral lyrics gave more tips to employees. However, in that study, the difference in tipping behavior could perhaps be explained not only by differences in the lyrics per se but also by variation in structural components of the music that were not controlled, such as tempo or style. Thus, the question remains whether exposure to prosocial information can really influence helping behavior and, by extension, tipping behavior. This evaluation was carried out by exposing restaurant patrons to quotes associated with altruism. Previous research has shown that information written on the bill can positively affect patrons’ tipping behavior: employees increase their tips when writing “thank you” (Rind and Bordia, 1995) or a patriotic message (Seiter and Gass, 2005) on the backs of checks or when drawing a smiling face or a picture of the sun on the check (Guéguen and Legohérel, 2000; Rind and Bordia, 1996). In this experiment, quotes associated that were or were not associated with altruism were written on the customers’ bill. It was hypothesized that exposure to altruism content would be associated with more generous tipping behavior.
300
C. Jacob et al. / International Journal of Hospitality Management 32 (2013) 299–301
1. Method 1.1. Participants The participants were 349 restaurant customers (217 males and 132 females) who were randomly assigned to three groups. All of them were seated alone at a table in two restaurants of two medium-size cities (both of about 75,000 inhabitants) in a very attractive spot in France. The restaurants proposed a menu offering mainly seafood (fish and shellfish). 1.2. Procedure Five waitresses (19- to 26-year-olds), regularly employed, were used as confederates in this experiment. However, they were not aware of the goals of our experiment, and they had not received any information about previous studies on tipping behavior. The experiment was conducted every day for four weeks (excluding Saturdays and Sundays) during the lunch hour because there were a sufficient number of patrons who were alone at that time (the restaurants where the experiment was carried out used to receive many commercial travelers who lunched alone). The waitresses were instructed to act as they always did. At the end of the meal, when the customers asked their waitress for the bill, she was instructed to consult a form with the order of the dishes associated with the table. This random distribution was done for each table. In this experiment, the waitress pressed a till key that added (or not, for the control group) a quote at the end of the bill. The altruism quote was a well-known quote by the French writer George Sand: “A good turn never goes amiss” (in French, Un bienfait n’est jamais perdu). The neutral quote was a Latin proverb: “He who writes reads twice” (in French, Celui qui écrit, lit deux fois). In the control condition, no quote was written on the bill. The quotes were printed in French because the experiment was conducted during the winter period where it was found in a previous study (Jacob et al., 2010) conducted in these two restaurants that most of the customers were French. The waitress folded the bill and placed it on the plate with, as usual, one sweet on the bill. She was instructed to put the plate on the customer’s table with a smile and to say “Here is the bill Sir/Madam” before leaving the table. After the customer had left the restaurant, the waitress came to the table and recorded how the customer had behaved in a notebook, namely, whether he/she left a tip (DV1) and the amount of money that was given (DV2). 2. Results In France, tipping is not expected because French legislation stipulates that a 12% service charge be included in the prices listed on a menu. Traditionally, when customers leave a tip in a restaurant, they put some money (coins or notes) directly on the bill plate or on the table. This is done whether the customers paid the bill by cash, check, or credit card. Thus, according to previous studies on tipping behavior conducted in France (Guéguen, 2002; Guéguen and Jacob, 2005, 2011; Guéguen and Legohérel, 2000; Jacob and Guéguen, 2012; Jacob et al., 2009, 2010) or in the Netherlands (Van Baaren et al., 2003) the numbers of customers who left a tip among the total number of customers waited on was the first dependent variable, whereas the amount of money left by the customers as a tip was the second dependent variable. A preliminary data analysis was conducted on the results recorded by the waitresses and revealed no interaction effect between the dependent variables and the waitresses. No main effect of patrons’ gender or significant interaction effect between the experimental conditions and the gender of the patrons were found both with the numbers of
Table 1 Percentage of tippers and monetary value of tips received (in euros) according to experimental conditions and customer gender. Measure
Altruism quote
Neutral quote
No quote
Number of tippers Amount of tip
47.0% (55/117) 0.56 (0.74)a
29.8% (34/114) 0.26 (0.48)
38.8% (34/118) 0.24 (0.44)
a
Mean; standard deviation in brackets.
customers who left a tip and with the amount of money left. Thus, the data were combined across waitresses and patron’s gender, and the results of the analysis are presented in Table 1. Using the number of participants who gave a tip, a chi-square independent test with the 3 experimental condition and tipping behavior as the dichotomous dependent variable was performed and revealed a main effect of experimental condition on tipping behavior (2 (2, N = 349) = 10.7, p = .005, r = .17). Further comparison revealed that the altruism quote condition was significantly different from the neutral quote condition (2 (1, N = 231) = 7.20, p = .007, r = .17) and the no-quote control condition (2 (1, N = 235) = 8.26, p = .004, r = .18) whereas the neutral quote condition was not significantly different from the no-quote control condition (2 (1, N = 232) = 0.06, p = .80, r = .02). With the amount of tip left by the patrons a one-way ANOVA for 3 independent groups was performed. A main effect of experimental condition was found (F(2, 314) = 9.10, p < .001, 2p = .06) with post hoc tests revealing that the altruism quote condition was significantly different from the neutral quote condition (LSD test, p = .001) and the no-quote control condition (LSD test, p = .003) whereas the neutral quote condition was not significantly different from the no-quote control condition (LSD test, p = .81). 3. Discussion The present findings showed that exposure to altruism quotes was associated with an increase in patrons’ tipping behavior. Customers gave tips more often to a waitress when they were exposed to an altruism quote and, when they did so, they gave her a larger amount of money. This effect was found for both male and female patrons. Such results exhibit a methodological and theoretical interest. Previous studies showed that exposure to songs with prosocial lyrics was associated with greater helping behavior (Greitemeyer, 2009a,b, 2011) and tipping behavior (Jacob et al., 2010). It was stated, however, that other variables could possibly help explain this altruism effect, such as tempo, style of music, etc. In our experiment, exposure to altruistic information was clearly associated with an increase in tipping behavior. These results confirmed that activation of a concept has an influence on subsequent information processing or behavior (Banaji et al., 1993; Bargh et al., 1996). The spreading activation theory (Anderson, 1983; Bargh, 1994) seems to provide a reasonable explanation for our results. According to this theory, information is encoded into cognitive units that form an interconnected network, and the retrieval of information is performed by spreading activation throughout this network. Hence, when someone is exposed to information, such as words, the network where this information is encoded is activated, and this individual can retrieve not only the concept associated with the visual and/or oral cue, but also further cognitive units that become available. In our study, the altruistic quote probably activated the concept of altruism which in turn activated further related concepts such as helping, solidarity, and generosity. Individuals in our experiment probably acted in such a way as to be congruent with such concepts stored in their memory, which may explain why they gave more tips to the waitresses. Thus it could be interesting in further studies to examine patrons’ thoughts and feelings associated
C. Jacob et al. / International Journal of Hospitality Management 32 (2013) 299–301
with quotes used in this experiment and to examine their relation with tipping behavior. This study confirms the validity of studying the influence of information that appears on customers’ bill (Guéguen and Legohérel, 2000; Rind and Bordia, 1995, 1996; Seiter and Gass, 2005). Our findings have some practical interest for restaurants’ employees who want to increase their incomes by increasing the tips left by their customers. Adding an altruism quote is an easyto-use method that could increase significantly their tip-generated income. Of course, this experiment had a number of limitations. Waitresses were not informed of the real objective of the study and of previous research on this topic. However, they may have unconsciously behaved differently, depending on the experimental condition, which in turn could have influenced the patrons’ tipping behavior. Additionally, only lone diners were tested in this experiment, and the generalization to group diners remains in question. Similarly, only the tipping behavior toward waitresses was tested, and it would be important to test tipping behavior toward waiters as well. Only two quotes were examining in this study and the generalization of the finding to all quotes with an altruistic content still remains in question. It could be interesting in further studies to examine if variation in altruistic content could be associated with variation in customer tipping behavior. References Anderson, J.R., 1983. A spreading activation theory of memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 22, 261–295. Banaji, M.R., Hardin, C., Rothman, A.J., 1993. Implicit stereotyping in person judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (2), 272–281.
301
Bargh, J.A., 1994. The four horsemen of automaticity: awareness, intention, efficiency, and control in social cognition. In: Wyer Jr., R.S., Srull, T.K. (Eds.), Handbook of Social Cognition, vol. 1, 2nd ed. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 1–40. Bargh, J.A., Chen, M., Burrows, L., 1996. Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (2), 230–244. Greitemeyer, T., 2009a. Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on prosocial thoughts, affect, and behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (1), 186–190. Greitemeyer, T., 2009b. Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on prosocial behavior: further evidence and a mediating mechanism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (11), 1500–1511. Greitemeyer, T., 2011. Effects of prosocial media on social behavior: when and why does media exposure affect helping and aggression? Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, 251–255. Guéguen, N., 2002. The effect of a joke on tipping when it is delivered at the same time as the bill. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 32, 1955–1963. Guéguen, N., Jacob, C., 2011. Enhanced female attractiveness with use of cosmetics and male tipping behavior in restaurants. Journal of Cosmetic Science. 62, 283–290. Guéguen, N., Jacob, C., 2005. The effect of touch on tipping: an evaluation in a French’s bar. International Journal of Hospitality Management 24, 295–299. Guéguen, N., Legohérel, P., 2000. Effect on tipping of barman drawing a sun on the bottom of customers’ checks. Psychological Reports 87, 223–226. Jacob, C., Guéguen, N., 2012. The Effect of physical distance between patrons and servers on tipping. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research 36, 25–31. Jacob, C., Guéguen, N., Boulbry, G., 2010. Effects of songs with prosocial lyrics on tipping behavior in a restaurant. International Journal of Hospitality Management 29 (4), 761–763. Jacob, C., Guéguen, N., Boulbry, G., Ardicioni, R., 2009. Waitresses’ facial cosmetics and tipping: a field experiment. International Journal of Hospitality Management 29, 188–190. Rind, B., Bordia, P., 1995. Effect of server’s “Thank you” and personalization on restaurant tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25 (9), 745–751. Rind, B., Bordia, P., 1996. Effect on restaurant tipping of male and female servers drawing a happy, smiling face on the backs of customers’ checks. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26 (3), 218–225. Seiter, J.S., Gass, R.H., 2005. The effect of patriotic messages on restaurant tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35 (6), 1197–1205. Van Baaren, R.B., Holland, R.W., Steenaert, B., Van Knippenberg, A., 2003. Mimicry for money: behavioral consequences of imitation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39, 393–398.