Imagine that you are walking down the street and suddenly you see a letter on the ground. It is addressed and stamped, but clearly (obviously) has not been mailed. It appears that the person who was planning on sending the letter dropped it.
Would you mail the letter?
In one survey of American college students, 95% of those asked said yes, they would mail the letter.
Now consider what actually happened when some researchers did an experiment to test this. They took 100 letters, addressed and stamped, and put them on the ground around some college dorms (small apartments for university students, usually owned by the college). Some of the dorms had very few students in them, while others were very crowded (had lots of students living there).
The letters around the near-empty dorms were almost all picked up and mailed by the students living there. But only 60% of the letters around the crowded dorms were posted (mailed) by the students.
What’s going on here?
As Adam Alter explains, it appears that people in crowded dorms felt “less connected” or linked to their fellow (sharing the same condition or situation) students. Students in the less crowded dorms felt more connected to the students around them, probably due to the smaller number of students living there.
Alter says that where we are shapes (influences; affects) who we are. Changing your environment can change your behavior, even for things we may think are inherent in (deeply or permanently part of) us and our personalities, such as whether we are kind or generous or thoughtful (think about helping others).
Just as the physical surroundings (environment) changes us, so does the “personal” environment we are in. Our behavior and actions change based on (due to; because of) the people we are with.
Smart parents know, for example, that the kinds of friends their child has will influence their child’s behavior. They try to make sure their children’s friends are not the “wrong crowd,” the kind of children who would negatively influence their own child.
Writer and researcher Frank Smith once said that “we learn from the company we keep.” The word company, you probably know, can mean a business organization, but here it means the people who are with us – our friends, co-workers, and neighbors. The “company we keep” are the people who are around you, the people you spend your time with.
We’d all like to think that as we get older, we become less influenced by where we are and those around us, that we develop our own set of principles (ideas that guide us). But is this really true? Perhaps we need to do the “lost letter” experiment around some retirement homes (places for people who no longer work due to their age) and see what happens.
Photo credit: Letter from The Noun Project, PD