Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

132 Chapter 5
touched on consumers’ spending. In the first study, as lone shoppers (no couples)
entered a large bookstore, an ‘‘employee’’ came up and handed them a
catalog. Alternating between customers, the employee-experimenter touched
about half the shoppers lightly on the upper arm. The results? Across 286
shoppers, those who were touched spent an average of $15.03; those who were
not touched spent just $12.23. And this difference was across the board, no
matter what the sex of the toucher or the shopper.
In another of his experiments, Hornik enlisted the help of eight servers—
four waiters and four waitresses—at a large restaurant. At the end of the meal,
the servers asked each of 248 couples (men and women) how the meal was.
Right then, for half the couples, the servers touched the arm of either the male
or the female in the couple for one second. The servers didn’t know it, but
they had been selected out of 27 waiters and waitresses in the restaurant to
represent two ends of a physical attractiveness scale. The results? Men and
women alike left bigger tips when they were touched, but the effect was
stronger for women patrons than it was for men. Overall, couples left about a
19% tip when the woman was touched, but only 16.5% when the man was
touched.
Field experiments like these can produce powerful evidence for applications
projects, but to be really useful, you need to back up results with ethnography
so that you understand the process. How did all this tipping behavior
play out? Did women who were touched suggest a bigger tip when the time
came to pay the bill, or did the men suggest the tip? Or did it all happen without
any discussion? Rich ethnographic data are needed here.
Field experiments are rare in anthropology, but not unprecedented. Marvin
Harris and his colleagues (1993) ran an experiment in Brazil to test the effect
of substituting one word in the question that deals with race on the Brazilian
census. The demographers who designed the census had decided that the term
parda was a more reliable gloss than the term morena for what English speakers
call ‘‘brown,’’ despite overwhelming evidence that Brazilians prefer the
term morena.
In the town of Rio de Contas, Harris et al. assigned 505 houses randomly
to one of two groups and interviewed one adult in each house. All respondents
were asked to say what cor (color) they thought they were. This was the ‘‘freechoice
option.’’ Then they were asked to choose one of four terms that best
described their cor. One group (with 252 respondents) was asked to select
among branca (white), parda (brown), preta (black), and amerela (yellow).
This was the ‘‘parda option’’—the one used on the Brazilian census. The other
group (with 253 respondents) was asked to select among branca, morena
(brown), preta, and amerela. This was the ‘‘morena option,’’ and is the intervention,
or treatment in Harris’s experiment.