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Petitioner's Attire and Petition Signing by Peace Demonstrators: A Field Experiment 1
Author(s) -
Suedfeld Peter,
Bochner Stephen,
Matas Carol
Publication year - 1971
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1971.tb00366.x
Subject(s) - petitioner , psychology , social psychology , field (mathematics) , political science , law , mathematics , pure mathematics , supreme court
Two female experimenters, one dressed as a “hippie” and the other wearing “straight” dress, solicited signatures for an anti‐war petition at the April 1971 Washington peace demonstration. Although the petition was identical in both conditions, and a large degree of attitudinal homogeneity in the subject population could be assumed, the hippie condition produced more signatures, more subjects who signed without looking at the petition, and attracted a larger number of unsolicited signatures. These differences were attributed to the effect of implied attitude (reference group) similarity between experimenters and subjects in the hippie and dissimilarity in the straight condition; in‐group members were more effective than out‐group members, despite experimenter‐subject similarity in explicit attitudes under both conditions.