Drunk Tank Pink Chapter 1 Summary

In chapter eight of Drunk Tank Pink, Adam Alter talks about locations and how the environment affected people’s daily lives. The chapter began by describing experiments involving people who grew up in different environments and how the different environments affected their behavior to certain situations. Those experiments had results proposing the idea that living in crowded areas would inhibit generosity and living in noisy places would hinder intellectual growth, and vice versa. Chapter eight also included experiments that were affiliated with nature; the researchers observed that people’s stress levels decreased and their health improved when some form of nature such as trees and grass were present. Some experiments focused on how the legibility

of certain words affected people’s ability to think more logically; other experiments illustrated on how physical features of the environment affected the actions and recollections of people. Even though it seems to have no effect on people, the environment plays a prominent role in determining people’s emotions and behaviors.
One experiment mentioned in the chapter touched on the relationship between the density of one’s living space and one’s conduct. The experiment posed the question: “How does living in high-density places affect people’s behavior?” The hypothesis was: “Living in high-density areas would obstruct one’s generosity because people wouldn’t help others if they think someone else will eventually help the person later on.” The question was answered through an experiment.
The observation method was a testing, cross-sectional, laboratory observation method.

The advantages of the cross-sectional method are that it’s less time-consuming and less expensive; the disadvantages are that the experiment will be more random and disconnected. The benefit of a laboratory observation method is that the environment will be controlled; the drawback is that the results would be more bias than the results of a naturalistic observation method. An advantage of testing is that it takes a shorter time than a case study, but the data from testing would be more broad. The materials needed were letters (mail) and people living in places with different densities. It took four hours for the experiment to be completed. The dependent variable was the amount of letters posted because more letters that were returned to the post demonstrated the generosity of the people living there; people who aren’t kind would not post the letters. The independent variable was whether the living space was low-, medium-, or high-density. There was no control group because people either live in low-, medium-, or high-density areas; there was also no placebo effect. The researchers were looking for a negative correlation between the amount of letters returned and the density of the living place; this means they wanted the amount of letters returned to be decreasing as the density of the living area increased. There weren’t any ethical issues because it isn’t morally wrong to make people post

letters.
The experiment was good because it dealt with people’s behavior regarding their living environment. The experiment used a simple method to test people’s benevolence by observing whether they would help post the letters or not. The chapter was very interesting and intriguing because I didn’t realize how much the environment could influence people’s daily lives. The biggest takeaway of the chapter was that living in rural areas is better than living in the city because the countryside has a low density population and has a lot of nature; however, I still decide to live in the city because there’s more interaction and excitement here than in the rural areas.