The Cinnabon Made Me Do It: Surprising Influences on Moral Behavior

“These factors seem to have a demonstrable impact on our behavior, and yet are morally irrelevant in the sense that they should not matter to what a morally virtuous person would do. What should we make of results like these?”

Suppose you are walking along in a shopping mall when suddenly someone approaches you to ask for help making change for a dollar. You gladly help—after all, it’s a small thing, and you have the change. Soon enough, you are on your way to the music store to buy some new headphones.

However, unbeknownst to you, something in your situation gave your helping a boost—the smell of the delicious Mrs. Fields cookies you had just passed by minutes before helping the stranger. In fact, were it not for the smell, you might have not helped at all.

How do we know this? It’s thanks to a fun study published in 1997 by the psychologist Robert Baron. In Baron’s set-up, shoppers in a mall had no idea that they were part of a study. Some of them (the control group) were approached to make change by a stranger after they had walked past neutral clothing stores. Others (the experimental group) were approached after they had walked passed Mrs. Fields Cookies or Cinnabon. The results were dramatic:

	Passing Clothing Stores	Passing Bakery Stores
Males Helping	22%	45%
Females Helping	17 %	61%

Baron’s work is an example of a striking body of research in social psychology over the past sixty years which has found that whether we act well or badly can be significantly influenced by morally irrelevant factors in our environment. Not only that, but these factors often exert their influence under our conscious radar screens. After all, most of the shoppers presumably had no idea that the pleasant smells were swaying them to be more helpful.