Our company is very fit. Everyone is pretty active; participating in competitive sports, the outdoors, or drunken Wii bowling competitions, we all partake in some activity that keeps us healthy and feeling good.
We have an office candy dish. It usually contains “fun size” and “bite size” to make you feel okay with the fact that you’re consuming something with absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever. Some people make special trips to the dish. Others will wander by on their way to a meeting. In either case, interoffice candy consumers rarely take a single piece. They’re so cute and small, they look like they pack fewer calories, and therefore feel justified taking several pieces.
This got me thinking, what if there were full-sized candy bars in the dish? Would people take them just as willingly as they take the socially acceptable fun size? Or will there be a stigma attached to taking a full fledged BAR of chocolate? My guess was that most would pass up the big candy. To prove my theory, on Monday at 9:30am, I launched a social experiment. The candy drawer was locked down, and the dish was filled with ten full size candy bars. Here’s a sampling of the findings from day one:
10am: Carly takes a full size Baby Ruth to “put in her drawer”
11:28am: Kelly browses, leaves empty handed
11:44am: Meg looks, but, “can’t trust myself”
11:50am: Jill, “can’t do it… are you kidding me?”
11:54am: Sam, “What is this?” (leaves empty handed)
After lunch: Alex takes a Baby Ruth, Tiffany and Meg “split” one, and Kelly takes a Nestle Crunch to her meeting and breaks it into little pieces to share with the others.
Five candy bars were taken over the course of the day. Throughout the week there were still takers, but most people were “sharing”, and overall consumption went down considerably.
Today, the candy drawer is unlocked, and the dish has four full sized bars in it. Balihooers are going directly to the drawer, ignoring the big bars altogether.
When there are donuts in the kitchen, someone always gets out a knife and cuts a morsel for themselves and leaves the other 90% of the glazed fried ring of goodness for the next guy/gal. Yes. A dozen donuts feeds a Balihoo gang of ~50. Something tells me if 4 dozen donut holes appeared in the kitchen, they would be gone in an hour or less.
Take ten. They’re small.
*For those called out by name in this blog, please know you’re not alone. There were about 40 others observed this week. Thanks for participating…err… um… unwillingly, unknowingly. I’m not judging you.
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