Of the 15 or so students interviewed, all said they would have been less willing to let someone in if she didn’t look like a student. Most said they wouldn’t let that person in at all.
“It’s a pretty good student community,” said LSA senior John Shepard, who let me into his house and said he wasn’t at all suspicious of me. “People are friendly to each other.”
For my first trial, I approached six guys standing on the lawn of a house down Church Street. Raising my voice a couple octaves so as to fully assume the role of an innocent drunk girl heading to the game, I blurted out my request in one breath.
“ExcusemeI’msorrydoyouthinkIcoulduseyourbathroom?”
The guys, who had now formed a semicircle around me, looked at each other. After about two seconds of painfully awkward silence, the guy who I will take to be the nice one said “Absolutely.”
The guy who I will take to be the one who’s never had a girlfriend shouted after me, “If you shit I’m going to kill you! Only number one!”
I escaped inside and panted in the bathroom for a few seconds. I heard them laughing outside at my expense. I emerged, told them it was for a story I’m writing, and asked if they had trusted my intentions.
“Sure I did,” one guy said. “What’re you gonna steal? A dirty sock?”
The guy who threatened to take my life if I soiled his toilet said, “I was not creeped out — I was flattered, because you are the first female to be here.”
The rest of my experiences were less eventful. After asking one guy if he lived at a house with about 15 kids partying on the lawn, he said no and asked why. I said I needed to use the bathroom. “Go wild,” he said.
When I appealed to some students grilling out on East University Avenue near Packard Street, a girl on the porch stared at me for a second, took a bite of her hot dog and said “Yeah, straight through.”
She said this was not the first time someone had asked to borrow the bathroom, and that she has always said yes.
“I’ve taken care of a girl’s bloody foot in my bathroom,” she said.
Schwarz said he wasn’t at all surprised by the results.
“If you’re in a familiar environment and people around you seem like you, you’re pretty much in autopilot,” he said. “As long as you seem to share some group attributes, people are willing to trust you.”
He said people are much more likely to let their guard down if they’re in a comfortable environment and the person they’re asked to trust looks like a student.
“The more similar they are to you, the more these things fly,” Schwarz said. “If you moved off campus, these things again become more distant and formal and people would be more cautious.”

Of the 15 or so students interviewed, all said they would have been less willing to let someone in if she didn’t look like a student. Most said they wouldn’t let that person in at all.
“It’s a pretty good student community,” said LSA senior John Shepard, who let me into his house and said he wasn’t at all suspicious of me. “People are friendly to each other.”
For my first trial, I approached six guys standing on the lawn of a house down Church Street. Raising my voice a couple octaves so as to fully assume the role of an innocent drunk girl heading to the game, I blurted out my request in one breath.
“ExcusemeI’msorrydoyouthinkIcoulduseyourbathroom?”
The guys, who had now formed a semicircle around me, looked at each other. After about two seconds of painfully awkward silence, the guy who I will take to be the nice one said “Absolutely.”
The guy who I will take to be the one who’s never had a girlfriend shouted after me, “If you shit I’m going to kill you! Only number one!”
I escaped inside and panted in the bathroom for a few seconds. I heard them laughing outside at my expense. I emerged, told them it was for a story I’m writing, and asked if they had trusted my intentions.
“Sure I did,” one guy said. “What’re you gonna steal? A dirty sock?”
The guy who threatened to take my life if I soiled his toilet said, “I was not creeped out — I was flattered, because you are the first female to be here.”
The rest of my experiences were less eventful. After asking one guy if he lived at a house with about 15 kids partying on the lawn, he said no and asked why. I said I needed to use the bathroom. “Go wild,” he said.
When I appealed to some students grilling out on East University Avenue near Packard Street, a girl on the porch stared at me for a second, took a bite of her hot dog and said “Yeah, straight through.”
She said this was not the first time someone had asked to borrow the bathroom, and that she has always said yes.
“I’ve taken care of a girl’s bloody foot in my bathroom,” she said.
Schwarz said he wasn’t at all surprised by the results.
“If you’re in a familiar environment and people around you seem like you, you’re pretty much in autopilot,” he said. “As long as you seem to share some group attributes, people are willing to trust you.”
He said people are much more likely to let their guard down if they’re in a comfortable environment and the person they’re asked to trust looks like a student.
“The more similar they are to you, the more these things fly,” Schwarz said. “If you moved off campus, these things again become more distant and formal and people would be more cautious.”

2. “Can you help me with my homework?”

Econ 101, the fabled B-school weeder class, is notorious for cultivating a culture of cutthroat underclassmen intent on beating the curve and telling their friends about their A in the class.
But as not all of those freshmen make it into the Ross School of Business, there must be a lot of liberal arts majors wandering around with residual knowledge of basic economics that they haven’t applied for years.
To test whether these students would try to summon those equations to help another student in need, I approached random students on campus and asked if they would help me do my homework. Every person and group I appealed to accepted my challenge.
With this semester’s CTools homework in hand, I headed to the UGLi and scouted out tables of students who had the distinct air of an econ major.
I’m either damn good at profiling or the class is omnipresent — more than 60 percent of the students I asked had taken the class.
For my first trial, I asked a table of freshman-seeming guys if they had taken Econ 101, but they hadn’t, so I moved on.
Further toward the back of the floor, I saw a boy and a girl sitting across from each other with what appeared to be math books spread across their table.
“Sorry to bug you guys — have either of you taken Econ 101?”
They said that they were both taking it right now. I explained my predicament (“I know that when marginal benefit and marginal cost intersect it’s in equilibrium, but where is it most efficient?”) and asked if they could look at it. Without hesitation, LSA freshman Chris Boffi got to work.
Unfortunately for my victims, the homework wasn’t due for two weeks and hadn’t yet been covered in class. Oops.
Boffi’s eyes bore into the worksheet and he reread the directions as he twirled his mechanical pencil with his left hand. He was silent for a while looking at it, but then started talking things out.
“I don’t think you have to worry about social cost until this one,” he said.
He drew some lines on the graph but then decided he was attacking the problem in the wrong way. He was. We hit the five-minute mark and the pencil was relocated to between his teeth. Soon after, he admitted defeat. “Yeah, I don’t know,” he said.
After I told them it was a set-up, they laughed.