Patrick O. Dolan pondered:
> Huh. Interesting topic! When I lived in an area where tax was ~7-8%,
> people used the heuristic of "doubling the tax" and adjusting from
> there. I calculate 10%, double it, and go from there. As an aside,
> my experience over the past ~5 years is that 15% is a minimum and
> closer to 20% is more typical. Is that just the 25-35 set I spend
> time with?
Interestingly, I've not come across any data on tipping by demographic
group (my mother is generally aghast at the 20% I generally put down).
What I've seen in the literature is that the relationship between
wait-staff performance and tip size (as proportion of bill) is a bit
blurry. For instance, while Lynn and Latane (1984) found tipping
unrelated to service quality (based on customer interviews), Bennett
(1983) found that accurate memory of cocktail waitresses (a measure of
performance, no?) led to higher customer satisfaction and tipping.
In teaching large intro psychology, I often preface my discussion of
tipping by asking who has worked or currently works in a food service
industry; there are always plenty of student who have (or do). It turns
out that for people who work in the industry there ARE heuristics (word
choice?) for which customers tip and which don't: age is perceived to be
a big factor, as is size of the party (as these go up, tips go down). I
always end up asking the class what other factors they think could
possibly lead to differences: sex? ethnicity? language? dress?
I have no data, but I've used this to introduce social-psych in my
intro-psych classes for some time and it ALWAYS generates good
discussion and allows me to pin useful material back to the examples
(stereotyping, prejudice, conformity (as resisted by Professor
Coleman!), social facilitation/interference, social norms, even group
polarization/groupthink and, if considered from the perspective of the
wait-staff, self-fulfilling prophecy).
It hadn't occurred to me that this as useful (pedagogically) as it is: I
always just 'did it.' Does anybody think that this, as an exercise, is
worthy of a Journal Teaching of Psych submission? Would anybody like to
implement it, collect some data, and pursue this as a
project/publication? Let me know.
Scott
Lynn, M. and Latane, B. (1984). The psychology of restaurant
tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 14(6), Nov-Dec 1984. pp.
549-561.
Bennett, H. L. (1983). Remembering drink orders: The memory skills
of cocktail waitresses. Human Learning: Journal of Practical Research &
Applications, 2(2), Apr-Jun 1983. pp. 157-169.
----------------------------
Scott C. Bates, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Utah State University
(435) 797 - 2975
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