I have been—and continue to be—a proponent of re-envisioning the Intro Psych course. While psych majors take the course, the vast majority of students who take Intro Psych are not psychology majors. What do the non-psych majors need to know about psychology? The good people from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) make a solid argument for why we should be covering industrial/organization (I-O) psych topics in Intro Psych: “If you're like most people, you'll spend more of your waking hours working than doing anything else.” It’s not a long argument, but it is a solid one. I will take that argument one step further. Not only is the psychology of work personally useful to our students—regardless of their career field—but in their workplaces, we want our former Intro Psych students to recognize when it may be appropriate to bring in an I-O psychologist. SIOP formed a Getting I-O into Intro Textbooks (GIT SIOP) Task Force that produced an I-O chapter for the Intro Psych course under a Creative Commons license: “The Creative Commons license means you can use it as-is, use parts of it, or even adapt it, as long as you give credit and link to the license.”   You have your choice of formats. There is the very pretty pdf with images (23 pages), a pdf without images (26 pages), and an easily-editable Word document (25 pages) where you can take what you want (with proper attribution) and leave the rest.    Chapter outline Overview Industrial psychology Job analysis Recruitment, retention, and placement Evaluating and managing worker performance Training and development Organizational psychology Employee attitudes Worker health and safety Motivation Teamwork and leadership Conclusion If using the chapter doesn’t work for you—or you’re not quite ready to find a spot for it in your Intro Psych course—SIOP has also created an Introduction to Industrial-Organization Psychology Mini-Course. Students read content and answer multiple choice questions. At the end of the course, there is a 10-question quiz. With a 70% on the quiz, students earn a certificate. Ask students to send you their certificate to earn credit. SIOP estimates that it will take students 30 minutes to complete this mini-course. And if that all is not enough, SIOP has created a webpage to help instructors. Resources here include “incorporating I-O into Intro,” “I-O resources for teachers,” and “teaching tools by topic.” SIOP deserves high praise from the Intro Psych teaching community for this work. With SIOP setting the bar, I encourage the Society for Personality and Social Psychology to undertake a similar project that would bring the Intro Psych personality chapter into the 21st century. ... View more

Like many of you and your students today (March, 2020) who are working from home. I am doing the same. While I am looking forward to the slew of research that is going to come out of this ABA experiment, this talk by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom may be a preview of the kind of finds we're going to see.  Bloom starts talking about his research here at about the 6:30 mark. Video Link : 2586 After watching this video, ask your students to identify the independent variable and dependent variables. How were participants randomly assigned to conditions? Why was it necessary to use random assignment and not just let participants decide if they wanted to work for home or the office? According to Bloom, what are the “three great enemies of working from home?” Bloom adds that having choice of whether to work from the office or work from home is key. During COVID-19, almost all of us in education in the US and other parts of the world—faculty, staff, and students—have no choice but to work from home. How may this impact our productivity? To expand the discussion, ask students to explore the pros and cons of teleworking and working onsite. If your students were psychological scientists, how could they go about researching the relative impact of each of those pros/cons. In other words, if students thought that “too many distractions at home” was a reason to work onsite, how could students find out how many workers would identify that as a factor and how big of a factor it was in their decision. ... View more

Originally posted on February 10, 2016. Three items from yesterday’s reading: 1. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) has just offered a nice video introduction to I/O Psychology (here). At 4-minutes, it’s well-suited to class use. 2. Not brand new—but new to me—is a wonderful 7½ minute illustrated synopsis of social-cognitive explanations of why, despite converging evidence, so many people deny human-caused climate change. The video, from biologist-writer Joe Hansen and PBS Digital Studios, is available here. For more on how psychological science can contribute to public education about climate change—and to a pertinent new U.N. Climate Panel conference—see here. 3. Does witnessing peers academically excelling inspire other students to excel? Or does it discourage them? Schools, with their love of prizes and awards, seem to assume the former. Researchers Todd Rogers and Avi Feller report (here) that exposure to exemplary peers can deflate, discourage, and demotivate other students (and increase their droppiing out from a MOOC course). ... View more

R. Eric Landrum (Boise State University) tells the story of a student who earned a BA and went out into the workforce. One day she ran into him and apologized for not using her psych degree. He asked what field she was working in. She replied, “I run my own business.” Landrum notes that we need to do a better job helping our psych majors understand that the skills and knowledge that they gain through the major will help them in a large number of career fields. Dialing it back to Intro Psych, we can help everyone who takes the Intro course see the value of psychology. Near the end of the Intro Psych course, show students these data from the June 2016 APA Monitor. People with a bachelor’s in psychology work primarily in sales, other work activities (i.e. “design, development, computer applications, production, quality management and work activities not otherwise specified”), professional services (e.g., “health care, counseling, financial services, or legal services”), and management/supervision. Other areas include teaching (11%), accounting/finance/contracts (9%), employee relations (5%), and research (3%). For an in-class or online discussion board activity, divide students into eight groups and assign each group one job category from the chart. (For larger classes, to keep group-size small, use more groups.) Ask students these questions: Identify at least one concept from each chapter we covered in this course that would be useful in this job field. For each concept chosen, briefly explain why it would be useful for those in that job field to know it. Students can write responses individually or as a group or each group could verbally report out. If time permits, you can opt to use a jigsaw classroom. If you have a class of 64 or more, create 8 groups of at least 8 students each. (Have less than 64 in a class? Use fewer groups and fewer students per group and assign each group two or more job categories.) Each group answers the questions above. Following discussion, each group member is assigned to a new group so that each new group now has at least one person who had discussed each job category. Within the new groups, group members share the concepts their former groups had identified. Ask students to look for commonalities and differences. Following discussion of these new groups, ask students to report out what they learned. For example, did the same concepts appear regardless of job category? Or were there some concepts that seem to be unique to a particular job category. Conclusion This is a nice integration activity that fits with the pillar model for Intro Psych (Gurung, et.al., 2016) and Goal 5: Professional Development from Guidelines 2.0 Gurung, R. A., Hackathorn, J., Enns, C., Frantz, S., Cacioppo, J. T., Loop, T., & Freeman, J. E. (2016). Strengthening introductory psychology: A new model for teaching the introductory course. American Psychologist, 71(2), 112-124. ... View more

Theresa Wadkins (University of Nebraska – Kearney) has a quick, but powerful way to demonstrate schemas in action. On the day she covers schemas, Wadkins walks into class, approaches a student, and asks, “How are you? Are you having a good day?” After the student responds, sometimes in befuddlement, she returns to the front of the room and begins her lecture. A few minutes later, she returns to the student and asks, “How is everything?” Again, the student responds, even more perplexed. And then back to the lecture. For the third and final time, she returns to the same student and asks, “Can I get you anything?” Wadkins then explains to her students that we have different schemas for what happens in a classroom and what happens in a restaurant. While being asked such questions is peculiar for a classroom, we would be put off if we weren’t asked these very same questions by a server in a restaurant. If you’d like to expand on this activity, ask students – in small groups or through an online discussion board – to identify the schema characteristics of what happens when a customer visits a sit-down restaurant and the schema characteristics of what happens when a customer visits a fast-food restaurant. Invite students to share the characteristics of each that they generated. Summarize the responses into a coherent schema for each type of restaurant. Ask students to reflect – in small groups, through an online discussion board, or as a written assignment – on what would happen if they had no schema for a sit-down restaurant when they walked into one. Or if they had no schema for a fast-food restaurant when they walked into one. Or if they walked into one type of restaurant with the schema for the other type of restaurant in mind. For added discussion or writing assignment, invite students to identify times when a schema they had did not match the situation. ... View more

The Washington Post published a wonderful article on the sense of shame that surrounds mental illness and how people are overcoming that shame and stepping out of the shadows. Ask your students to read the article and respond to the following questions in class as a small group discussion, online through a class discussion board, or as an out-of-class written assignment. 1. Those interviewed for the article expressed a fear of coming out as having mental illness. What is the stigma associated with mental illness, and why would those with mental illness fear others knowing? 2. The article identifies several ways in which people with mental illness are coming out publicly. What are those ways? If you were to come out publicly as having mental illness, which of those ways would you choose and why? 3. Visit the blog http://stigmafighters.com. Choose one blog post and answer the following. a. What is the person’s name and what they do in life (short descriptions are typically at the end of each post)? b. What type of mental illness do they have? c. Describe their milestone events, such as their first memory of symptoms, their first diagnosis. d. What’s it like for them to live with mental illness? e. What reactions did you have as you read their story? Itkowitz, C. (2016, June 1). Unashamed and unwell. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/wp/2016/06/01/unwell-and-unashamed ​[Note: Published in the paper on June 2, 2016 if you're looking for it in a library database.] ... View more

If you make candy bars and sell them through vending machines, you can use operant conditioning principles to get people to do all sort of things. In this case, Nestlé, the maker of Kit Kat bars in Brazil, put special vending machines on two different college campuses in the same Brazilian city. The machines streamed video to each other. Players stepped up to each machine and pressed play (“jogar” in Portuguese). The goal? To win a staring contest. The winner earned a Kit Kat Chunky chocolate bar. Video Link : 1628 Bonus: If you’d like to expand your coverage of schemas to talk about differences in food preferences around the world, tell your students about the phenomenon that is Kit Kat, the most popular candy, in Japan. Ask your students to guess how many flavors of Kit Kat there are in Japan. The answer: almost 300 (Goldman, 2016). Some of the flavors: grilled potato, cherry blossom, soybean, blueberry cheesecake, chocobanana, white peach, green tea, pumpkin, apple, mango, lemon, red bean paste, apple vinegar, pineapple, kiwi, cappuccino, jasmine tea (The weird and wacky…, n.d.). Want to try out some of these flavors yourself? You can order some here. Why is Kit Kat so popular in Japan? One factor is probably because its name is similar to the Japanese phrase kitto katsu – good luck (literally, surely win) (Goldman, 2016). Goldman, R. (2016, May 13). Japan has a Kit Kat for every taste, and then some. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/world/what-in-the-world/kit-kat-japan.html The weird and wacky flavors of Kit Kat in Japan. (n.d.). Retrieved May 28, 2016, from http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/worlds-weirdest-kit-kat-candy-bars/ ... View more

The Crisis Text Line is a crisis hotline that lets those in crisis text a volunteer crisis counselor. Since they launched in 2013, millions of texts have been exchanged between those asking for help and those providing it. This 10-minute TED talk by the founder Nancy Lublin provides an inspiring overview. Video Link : 1632 For students in crisis I’m adding this statement to my syllabus: Counseling Center.   Are you feeling stressed about college? Tests? Your future? A relationship? A loss? Adjusting to a new culture? An addiction, yours or someone else's? Living? Visit Highline's Counseling Center (counseling.highline.edu) in Building 6, upstairs on the north side of the building. Email: counseling@highline.edu . Phone: (206) 592-3353 If the Counseling Center is closed and you need to talk with someone now, call the King County Crisis Clinic at (206) 461-3222. If you'd rather text with someone, contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HELLO to 741-741. For texters concerned about privacy, the volunteer counselors don’t see their phone numbers. It’s all done through an encrypted computer interface. And for those who are really concerned, they can text “loofah” (or similar spellings) to have their texts scrubbed from the system (Dupere, 2016). Is your psych club, Psi Beta chapter or Psi Chi chapter looking for a project? Print and post flyers on your campus. You can use the Crisis Text Line’s pre-made flyer. Or do a fundraiser. Crisis Text Line accepts donations. How to become a volunteer Volunteers apply, and those who are accepted undergo 34 hours of online training. Volunteers commit to doing one 4-hour shift per week for a year. Do you have students who are over 18 years old who might be interested in volunteering? Download the Crisis Text Line volunteer flyer: http://www.crisistextline.org/wp-content/uploads/CTLVolunteerFlyer.pdf. It’s not a guaranteed gig; 39% of those who apply are accepted to begin the training (Dupere, 2016). Show me the data All of those 18 million texts provide a boat-load of data. And those data are publicly available at http://crisistrends.org. Texts about depression increase throughout the day, peaking at 8pm. Texts about family issues are most common on Sundays. The state with the most LGBTQ-related texts? Alaska. The least? Vermont. The state with the most bullying-related texts? Vermont. The least? New Hampshire. Starting in Spring 2014, texts about anxiety and texts about suicidal thoughts co-occur. You can also choose a topic to see a sample text and a word cloud of the top 50 words that appear in texts related to that topic. Here’s what I got when I selected anxiety. If you’re a researcher interested in using their data, their FAQ says, “Data access is available to approved academic researchers. The application will be available here in late January 2016.” As of this writing (June 2016), I don’t see an application. If you’re interested, email them at info@crisistextline.org.    Dupere, K. (2016, May 28). This text line is helping teens talk about mental health without saying a word. Retrieved May 31, 2016, from http://mashable.com/2016/05/28/crisis-text-line/ ... View more

White light is the presence of all of the visible light waves. White noise is the presence of all of the sound waves within the range of human hearing. Because our sensory systems are optimized to detect change, noises at night are likely to jar us awake. White noise machines or smartphone apps (or fans) mask other noises. The frequencies from those other noises blend into the white noise as long as the loudness of the other noises is the same or lower than the white noise. If they blend in well enough, our brains won’t detect them, and we sleep right through the sound. (Mileage varies. Some people are more sensitive to other noises when presented inside of white noise.) Side note: Pink noise is like white noise in that all of the frequencies are there, but with pink noise, the higher frequencies have decreased loudness. LiveScience has a nice explanation of the difference. Why is it called pink noise? In light, the higher frequencies are on the blue end of the spectrum. If those higher frequencies in white light are reduced, the light would appear more pink. Some people prefer pink noise over white because white noise sounds too high-pitched. World War II (source: 99 Percent Invisible, Episode 208: Vox Ex Machina) The 1939 World’s Fair in New York debuted the first voice synthesizer, created by sound engineer Homer Dudley of Bell Labs. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the US called on Dudley to solve a serious communication problem. For allied military leaders to talk with each other, they had to use shortwave radio – that anyone could listen in on. They had been using a scrambling technique that would switch the frequencies of the voices, so that high frequency sounds would transmit as low frequency and vice versa. Decoding those transmissions was as easy as it appears – for anyone listening in. Homer Dudley created a 2,000 square foot, 50-ton computer that compressed and digitized voices then masked them in white noise, on the fly. The trick? Two identical vinyl records of recorded white noise – for each conversation. At least 3,000 pairs of these records were made – each with a different white noise pattern. One set stayed in Washington, DC; the other set was sent to London. Each pair had a codename, such as wild dog. Before a call, the communication officers would decide which record to use. At the Pentagon in Washington, DC, the communication officers would open a short wave radio connection to London. At the designated time, each side would start their records. The voice from, say Truman, would be sent from his microphone, through the machine that digitized his voice, then mixed his digitized voice with the white noise from the record, and finally sent it out over the shortwave radio frequency. To anyone listening in on that radio frequency, they would hear only white noise since Truman’s voice would blend into the white noise. Across the pond in London, the signal would be intercepted, run through the machine where the white noise playing on the vinyl record would be subtracted, and Churchill would hear Truman’s digitized voice. After the call, the records were destroyed. For the next call, a new pair was used. This device “was involved in virtually every major military operation after 1942. It was even critical in the planning of the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the atomic bombs over Japan.” Another side note: When this technology was declassified in the 1970s, researchers put it to good use. It’s digital compression that smooshes our voices enough to be sent through cell phone towers. Our MP3 audio files and streaming video files use this same compression technology. Conclusion This Memorial Day weekend, when you turn on your white noise generator, give a special nod to those fought in World War II. ... View more

The 1960s and early 1970s was a rough time in the United States – 1968 alone gave us the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy and riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Vietnam War protests were occurring on college campuses across the country – 1970 brought the Kent State University shootings. Out of this mayhem rose Bill Backer (born June 9, 1926 – died May 13, 2016). In 1971, his flight to London was forced to land in Ireland thanks to fog at his destination airport. “The next morning, Mr. Backer was stunned to see the diverse group of passengers who had been angry the night before cheerfully conversing in the coffee shop… ‘People from all over the world, forced by circumstance, were having a Coke – or a cup of coffee or tea – together.’” (Roberts, 2016). Bill Backer was the adman who brought us this commercial, introduced to a new generation in the final episode of Madmen. Video Link : 1614 In this one-minute commercial – music video, really – Backer tells us that while we all may be different in so many ways, by sharing a Coke, we are all part of a single ingroup. During such a fractious time period, what a wonderful message: Hey everyone, let’s just have a Coke and sing as one – if only just for a minute. In 2016, on the eve of a U.S. presidential election, with the country feeling as divided as ever, I would love to see someone, including an advertiser, step forward and offer a unifying message. I tell my students that what would bring about world peace is being attacked by aliens from outer space (one heck of a superordinate goal), but I much prefer the ingroupiness invoked by a serene image of all of us on a hilltop, singing together with a Coke in hand.   For a quick classroom demonstration, show the video to your students. Ask students in pairs, small groups, or as a class, to posit some possible ingroups for the people on the hilltop before they gathered there (e.g., culture, country of origin), and then identify the dominant ingroup conveyed by the commercial (e.g., Coke drinkers). Conclude the exercise by saying, “And if you’re drinking a Coke, you’re part of that ingroup.” Bonus tip: If you do buy the world a Coke, you'll probably feel happier -- "Doing good... makes us feel good" (Myers, 2014). Myers, D. G., & DeWall, C. N. (2014). Psychology in everyday life (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Worth. Roberts, S. (2016, May 16). Bill Backer, who taught the world (and Don Draper) to sing, dies at 89. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/business/bill-backer-who-taught-the-world-and-don-draper-to-sing-dies-at-89.html ... View more

Whatever words researchers have chosen to use to refer to people with intellectual disability have been turned into pop culture insults, such as idiot, imbecile, and moron. In more recent decades when researchers favored the term mentally retarded, “retard” became the preferred insult. In fact I heard a student utter this in my class just a couple weeks ago. The student, I am sure, did not intend to offend an entire group of people. Instead, she was using a word she learned to be a good stand-in for asinine. Personally, I’d like to see asinine make a comeback. It’s a good word. It nicely calls out asinine behavior without denigrating a group of people. In the fall of 2012, after a presidential debate, Ann Coulter tweeted “I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard” (https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/260581147493412865). On the Special Olympics website the next day John Franklin Stephens responded. “I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.” His time was well-spent; he wrote a beautiful, well-crafted response. He closed with this, “Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor. No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much. Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.” He signed it, “A friend you haven’t made yet.” More recently, a New York Times article (May 7, 2016) reflected on the use of the term intellectual disability, the favored term for the last decade. The article provides a nice historical summary of both the language used and how people with intellectual disabilities were treated. Michael Wehmeyer (director of the University of Kansas Beach Center on Disability) notes that intellectual disability is “the first term that doesn’t refer to the condition as a defective mental process – slow, weak, feeble… Intellectual disability conveys that it is not a problem within a person, but a lack of fit between that person’s capacities and the demands of the environment in which the person is functioning.” Although he personally prefers cognitive disability (and so do I, not that I really get to have an opinion on the matter). It is difficult to imagine how “intellectual disability” could be twisted into an insult. While those who think of such things work on that, the rest of us can work on helping our students understand how offensive it is to casually toss around the word retarded as an insult. This is an easy topic to tackle when covering development, intelligence, or perhaps even better, stereotyping and prejudice. We seem to have largely moved past “that’s so gay” as an insult. We can do the same with “that’s so retarded.” Signed, The niece of a woman with an intellectual disability ... View more

While we can talk about auditory hallucinations in class, it’s difficult for students to understand how much of an impact this experience can have on the people who must cope with the hallucinations. The free Hearing Voices app provides students with simulated auditory hallucinations (Android; may or may not be available for iOS – check iTunes). The app’s disclaimer statement notes that the audio simulations were “recorded by people who hear voices. The content is designed to reflect the variety of voices commonly experienced, as such some voices will be positive, providing support and encouragement, while others will be confusing or critical, perhaps repeating strange phrases or disparagements. It is vitally important that the recordings sufficiently mimic real-life and therefor the footage you will hear does contain profanities and explicit language which some people may find offensive.” The app comes with two activities and three exercises. The activities ask the listener to do a memory task and a mental math task while listening to the simulated auditory hallucinations. The exercises ask the listener to engage in conversation with a friend or engage in some other everyday activity while listening to the audio. If you would like to have students experience this in class, ask them to bring headphones (the iPhone users can plug their headphones into the Android phone of another student). One student can listen to the simulation while holding a conversation with the student next to them. And then have students switch roles so the other student can experience the simulated auditory hallucinations. Each activity and exercise comes with a “reflective prompt” that you may choose to use as a writing prompt for an out-of-class assignment. If students would like to explore further, in the Podcasts section of the app, four people speak of their experiences with auditory hallucinations. In the Explanations section, students can explore sociocultural, psychological, and biological contributors to the experience of auditory hallucinations. At the time of this writing, the app contains some glaring typos, but that doesn’t detract from the app’s value. There are several auditory hallucination simulation videos available on YouTube, such as this one. If you don’t want to ask students to download an app, students can launch on of those videos instead, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vvU-Ajwbok. Video Link : 1613 [Thank you to Dana Wallace for posting on May 4, 2016 a link to this Hearing Voices app on the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook page!] ... View more

The Discovering the Scientist Within: Research Methods in Psychology author team— Gary Lewandowski​, Natalie Ciarocco​, and David Strohmetz​—would like to share our sincere thanks for your overwhelming interest in our recently published first edition. Since publication in December, we've been so delighted to see that our vision to create a text with a student-centric "learning by doing" approach has resonated with so many our of colleagues throughout North America. Thank you for your reviews, comments, support, and excitement. We hope that you will contact us with any questions! Best wishes in your courses in the upcoming year. Sincerely, Gary, Natalie and Dave What's so different about Discovering the Scientist Within? Each design chapter focuses on a single research question, which provides a strong foundation for students’ understanding of the actual design and the entire research process. Each design chapter repeats all steps of the research process, which puts into classroom practice the authors’ own experience-based conclusion that repetition is the key to solidifying research skills—skills that lead to success in the laboratory, in the workplace, and beyond. Book-specific Research in Action activities in LaunchPad Solo put students in the role of the researcher and ask them to make decisions in planning and executing a study from idea to results. The authors have provided the most comprehensive Instructor’s Resource Manual for the research methods course, containing nearly 300 sources to make teaching methods easier and more relatable to students. ... View more

Susan Nolan, presenting at the Northwest Conference on Teaching Introductory Psychology, offered some suggestions on diversifying the images in your presentations – and I’d add diversifying name used in your exam questions – to ensure that all students see people and names that are both familiar to them and not familiar to them. I teach on a diverse campus where our students or their parents have come from all over the world. I use my students’ names in exam questions. Last term, I had one student, as she handed in her exam with a big grin said, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen my name on an exam!” Nolan suggested visiting Wikipedia’s most common surnames page. Choose a name, and then, if you’re looking for a photo to use on a presentation slide, search that name in Google images. Be sure to click on “search tools” and then under “usage rights,” choose “labeled for noncommercial reuse.” Alternatively, you can use a fake name generator, like, well, FakeNameGenerator.com. Choose the gender you’d like or leave it set to random. Choose your “name set,” such as “Arabic.” Click “Generate.” When I just ran it for Arabic, it generated Hafsah Yakootah Khouri. I can use that name in an exam question, or I can do a Google Images search for an image I can use on a presentation slide. Again, b e sure to click on “search tools” and then under “usage rights,” choose “labeled for noncommercial reuse.” Do you give your students case studies of fictional people? Fake Name Generator is a terrific site for creating a fake person. Not only does it generate names, it will generate an entire fake identify, including address (that’s what the “country” field is for), phone number, birthday, MasterCard number, occupation and company, height, weight, blood type, favorite color. ... View more

On April 11, 2016 Richard Ransom, the founder of Hickory Farms, died at the age of 96 (Walsh, 2016). In a masterful use of the norm of reciprocity Hickory Farms stores offered samples before it was popular to do so. Today it’s commonplace; not so in the 1950s and 1960s. "The women didn’t bother asking customers if they wanted a taste – they just cut off bite-size pieces and held them out to people, Robert Ransom [Richard’s son] recalled. Shoppers felt obligated to take and eat what they were offered, and after tasting meats and cheeses every few steps around the store, they felt obligated to buy something" (Walsh, 2016). Does giving a free sample actually make a difference in sales? You bet. Friedman & Rahman (2011) compared four conditions delivered in a fast-food restaurant: no greeting/no gift, greeting/no gift, greeting/free yogurt, greeting/free key chain. The greeting of customers didn’t matter. What had the most impact was giving a customer a free gift, and, no, it didn’t matter what that free gift was. Those who received a free gift (yogurt or key chain) spent 46% more on their purchase than those who did not receive a free gift. If I were just starting a business like Hickory Farms, I’d give out free samples, too! Friedman, H. H., & Rahman, A. (2011). Gifts-upon-entry and appreciatory comments: Reciprocity effects in retailing. International Journal of Marketing Studies, 3(3). doi:10.5539/ijms.v3n3p161 Walsh, M. W. (2016, April 16). Richard K. Ransom, founder of Hickory Farms, dies at 96. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/business/richard-k-ransom-founder-of-hickory-farms-dies-at-96.html ... View more