"Consider anecdotal evidence about why undergraduates at Stanford University hesitate to wear bike helmets when they ride across campus. Many bike accidents occur every year, and numerous injuries could be prevented if more undergraduates just wore helmets (indeed, they are well aware of this hazard). But although this safety failure could be due to a number of factors, many undergraduates explained their reluctance to wear helmets based on concerns of identity communication - they chose not to wear helmets because graduate students wore them. Graduate students were not disliked by undergrads, but they were seen as socially awkward and overly intense. Thus, some undergraduates avoided helmets to avoid giving others the mistaken impression that they were akin to this social group."
Socially awkward and overly intense?
I think that phrase describes about 83% of my friends during undergrad, but they were all just graduate students in the making.
Source: Berger & Rand (2008). Shifting signals to help health: Using identity signaling to reduce risky health behaviors. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 509-518.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
hummm. That's interesting. The funny thing (well..to me at least..) was that, while at MIT, I always thought it was the undergrads who were awkward and intense.
Though that's probably just another symptom of my own social awkwardness.
I thought we didn't wear helmets because it was one more thing to carry around in class and we liked living on the edge ;) (actually you could never pick up any speed on campus, with all the pedestrians)
Lee, yeah, that was my experience, too, but it's different at football schools like Stanford.
Jen, actually, I think the hassle of carrying a helmet around is probably a major reason people don't want to wear them, period.
I was amused to note that in one of the pilot tests for the studies reported in the paper, they found that Stanford undergrads viewed both grad students and online gamers as groups they had positive perceptions of but did not want to be confused with.
Today in my class that is mixed grad/undergrad, I determined that undergraduate males can be distinguished by graduate males by looking at their t-shirts. Graduate males hang or fold theirs, while it appears that most undergraduate males keep them snug in the laundry basket until it's time to wear them.
Post a Comment