From the archives: We’re always looking for articles that intrigue, or make us smile. Looking back, this column from the 2017 Listener archives, where Marc Wilson illustrates the power of a uniform, did both.
Before he had a Pretty Woman or a Runaway Bride, Richard Gere was An Officer and a Gentleman. The highlight of this movie, female friends tell me, is Gere in his pre-silver-fox manifestation, wearing a pristine dress uniform. Everybody, apparently, likes a man in uniform. But what about a woman in uniform?
A 2015 UK Metro magazine article says a fireman’s uniform is the most popular get-up among male strippers’ clientele. Police officers, airline pilots, air stewards and doctors follow in that order. I’m not sure how scientific the “research” is, though, because there are no academic references, and dentists, teachers and cyclists also make the list.
To illustrate the power of a uniform, imagine the following scenario: you’re strolling along the street when a burly fellow stops you. He’s wearing a medium-blue shirt, dark-blue pants and black shoes. His shirt and hat bear the badge of the local fire station. He directs your attention to a young, weedy, disconsolate-looking student beside a parking meter. “This fellow is overparked at the meter, but doesn’t have any change. Give him a dime!” Okay, imagine it’s 50c, do you hand it over? What if the person who stops you is dressed in a crisp business suit? Or is unshaven and wearing greasy overalls and holey sports shoes?
One of these three scenarios describes the experience of participants in a 1982 study by a then 23-year-old Brad Bushman (the weedy student) about the time when women were swooning over Gere. One hundred and fifty lucky pedestrians were stopped (but not harmed) for this experiment. The results were roughly what you’d expect: 82% of them coughed up a dime for the firefighter, but only 50% for the man in the business suit. Perhaps surprisingly, 45% complied with the “bum”, the last of the three parking-money solicitors. Fascinatingly, when asked why they handed over the money, people gave different explanations, depending on the attire of their accoster. “Because he told me to” was a common reaction to the uniformed man, but “because it was the right thing to do” was more for the suit or the bum. People appeared to base their motivation on what their accoster was wearing.
In 1988, Bushman did a second study, this time with a female confederate giving the orders. In the “panhandler” condition, the woman was scruffily dressed; in a status-authority condition, she wore formal dress; and in the role-authority condition, she wore a non-specific but militaristic dark-blue uniform. About half the participants handed over the money for the “panhandler” and status-authority, but almost three-quarters complied with the uniformed woman’s request. No doubt, Bushman would argue that he couldn’t dress a woman as a firefighter in the less-enlightened early 80s.
This tells us what we know from our intuitive experience: if you’re going to dress up and con people out of their hard-earned dimes, wear a uniform.
We’re somewhat trained to defer to authority, and we know what it wears. But not everyone who was asked for the cash handed it over, which means this deference isn’t universal.
In 2009, not content with this result, French social psychologist and researcher Nicolas Guéguen told us what we really want to know: do firefighters get the girl more often than scruffs like me? An elegant experiment – man (in civvies or firefighter garb) smiles at a woman on the street or outside a bar. Does she smile back?
Civilians get a smile no more than a quarter of the time, but the firefighter … 85% smiles on the street and a respectable 63% outside the bar. And a phone number was given by the owner of one smile in five. But I bet women will smile at Richard Gere regardless of what he’s wearing.
This article originally appeared in the April 8, 2017, issue of the New Zealand Listener.
