Going Up

Bill Barol (email, Twitter) is a former senior writer at Newsweek and his journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Slate, and elsewhere. He also blogs at Forbes, Huffington Post and Pix365.

Photo by Ged Carroll. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology makes a case that height makes right. That is, it cites four separate studies showing that people who were physically elevated (up on a raised platform, for example) behaved in a more humane and altruistic fashion than those below. As Scientific American notes today, “height is often used as a metaphor for virtue: moral high ground, God on high, looking up to good people, etc.” The journal article, by Larry Sanna and associates at the University of North Carolina, suggests that height’s value may be more than symbolic. What if, as one of the studies posits, escalators actually elevate good intentions: “Twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator.”

That said, escalators aren’t all good.