(This posting includes a handout LINK AT THE END OF THIS POST which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

I was totally confused. I saw 18-year-old Ronny walking outside his house carrying a guitar case, but I knew he didn’t play the guitar. I asked him if he was starting to take lessons. He said, “No, but I’m planning to find a date for a party. And I just learned three tricks to do that, and one of them uses a guitar case.” Then he told me about the three interesting experiments.

Researchers sent a very handsome guy to a shopping mall in France to ask women for their phone numbers so that he could call them for a date. He stood in front of different types of stores (for example, a bakery, a shoe store, a café) and as women walked by, he approached them. However, he wasn’t very successful. Only 13% of the women gave him their numbers when he stood in front of those shops. Surprisingly, however, he was twice as successful (26% of the time) in front of one particular shop: a flower shop.

The researchers have a theory about these results. (See complete article below.)

For background information about these articles and for suggestions for how to use them with your students, see  • Introducing “Short, High-Interest Readings”  Also, I’ll be adding more of these articles in the right-hand column: ESL Reading> Short, High Interest Articles for Extensive Readings

Here is the 10th article. You can download the article for your students by clicking on the link at the end. Also included are three optional exercises: True-False Questions; Paraphrasing Exercise; Reflection Exercise.

Hidden Tricks for Getting People to do What You Want

I was totally confused. I saw 18-year-old Ronny walking outside his house carrying a guitar case, but I knew he didn’t play the guitar. I asked him if he was starting to take lessons. He said, “No, but I’m planning to find a date for a party. And I just learned three tricks to do that, and one of them uses a guitar case.” Then he told me about the three interesting experiments.

Researchers sent a very handsome guy to a shopping mall in France to ask women for their phone numbers so that he could call them for a date. He stood in front of different types of stores (for example, a bakery, a shoe store, a café) and as women walked by, he approached them. However, he wasn’t very successful. Only 13% of the women gave him their numbers when he stood in front of those shops. Surprisingly, however, he was twice as successful (26% of the time) in front of one particular shop: a flower shop.

The researchers have a theory about these results.

In human minds, flowers are connected to romance. However, these women didn’t realize that their minds were making this connection.

Later, when the researchers asked the women who gave him their number if they were influenced by the flower store, all the women said no. They said that they just decided to give him their number. In other words, they weren’t aware that something caused them to do this.

Researchers conducted a similar “dating” study. This time the 20-year-old guy walked up to 300 women between 18 and 22 years old. He told them they were very pretty and asked them for their phone number. For the first 100 women, the guy carried a sports bag. For the next 100 women, he had a guitar case. Finally, he had nothing in his hands when he talked to the last group of 100 women.

The study results found that 31% of the women gave him their phone number when he was carrying the guitar case. However, when he was carrying nothing, only 14% gave him their numbers, and even fewer, 9% did when he had a sports bag.

The researchers explained that a man carrying a guitar case can look intelligent and probably has many different interests. Also, women might think he is rich and famous, just like popular musicians we can see in social media.

I wasn’t too surprised about the results from the third experiment. In this one, half of the time the man was walking a friendly-looking dog on a leash, and half of the time he was walking alone. As he did in the other experiments, he asked some women to give him their phone number. When he had a dog with him, 28% of the women did, but only 9% did when he was alone.

If my neighbor, Ronny, asks me to let him take my dog for a walk, now I think that I’ll know why he wants to do that.

Here is the link to the article and exercises that you can use with your students: Hidden Tricks ARTICLE_EXERCISES

David Kehe
Faculty Emeritus

*About the free-download materials. During my 40 years of teaching ESL, I have had many colleagues who were very generous with their time, advice and materials. These downloads are my way of paying it forward.