Well Dressed vs. Poorly Dressed Who will be helped first? By: Harvey & Sunny

Experimental Design Our experiment consisted of two people going into the same store, one after the other. One was wearing beaten up clothes like old sweatpants, a t shirt, gloves and torn up shoes. The other was wearing dress pants, a dress shirt, a belt, and dress shoes. They would enter a certain store one by one record how long it took for the workers to help them people and how they were treated.

Experimental Question and Hypothesis Our hypothesis was that the poorly dressed person would be helped first. We predicted that the workers would expect the poorly dressed person to steal something so they would help them first but treat them badly. The well dressed person would be helped quickly and with a positive attitude. The experiment was designed to test how judgmental people are.

Execution We visited many stores such as Le chateau, American Eagle, Zumiez, Bench etc. The experiment went quite smoothly however if the poorly dressed man could have worn older clothes we would have gotten better results. The variables included style of store as well. Skater stores would obviously treat the more casual clothed man better while high end stores would do the opposite.

Results After testing many stores we observed that the poorly dressed man was not helped at all but rather watched carefully. Workers would always keep and eye on him and make sure he knew he was being watched. This happened at the majority of stores. As for the well dressed man he was treated very nicely and respectfully, getting help in under a minute.

Conclusion Based on out results we found out that people are very judgmental. Instead of talking to the person they just looked at the way he was dressed and made a decision what kind of person they are. For the poorly dressed person they thought he was a thief and for the well dressed person they thought of him as a rich person with good morals and beliefs.

Hypothesis/Reaction No, our experiment did not back up our experiment. We thought that the poorly dressed man would be helped first however he was not helped at all. We were not too surprised at the results because we expected the workers to be alarmed. However, we did not expect that he would not be helped at all in so many places (only 2/10)