The Rule of Simple: cafeteria design and student behaviors
I’m fond of simple stuff. Yeah, some things are complicated. But many things get overlooked because of how simple they appear to be. People just don’t see them, or think that they can’t be very important because they’re so simple.
One of my bosses used to say, “Never be afraid to look for the obvious and to ask the simple questions.” (This from a man who spent his career orchestrating rocket-science financial transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars.)
I try to remember that Rule of Simple with anthropology. There’s plenty of complexity in anthro. But at work, when I’m using anthro glasses to examine organizations and come up with practical recommendations, there’s a lot of simple stuff that can be a big influence on people’s behavior, the resulting social dynamic and thus organizational performance.
A recent New York Times article by Carol Pogash gave a great example. It turns out that many schoolkids who qualify for subsidized meals don’t eat them. Kids will go hungry rather than eat free food. Why?
Apparently part of the answer is the physical layout of cafeterias. Many cafeterias provide one food line/area for the official institutional meals (available to both subsidized and cash paying students) and another food line/area for cash-only meals (typically snacks and fast food that don’t meet school nutritional requirements).
For decades, studies of office layouts have shown that relatively small physical distances can have major impacts on people’s communication patterns and feelings of “belonging” in a given space. The usual truism quoted is that 30 yards of distance between two people’s work spaces might as well be 30 miles. Just walking a short distance can generate a feeling of going into “alien territory.” People tend to restrict their movements and their communications to zones they designate as “theirs” or as “known/friendly territory.”
(There’s a great HBS article here by Thomas Davenport that summarizes some key findings related to office design.)
Apparently the physical spaces in schools, as in offices, drive complex patterns of individual and group behaviors. For students, lunchtime is the major collective daily social event and a big social signaling opportunity. Students choose what physical location they want to inhabit during the lunch hour, and what physical messages/appearance/identity they want to publicly show to their peers. For many students, “free lunch kid” is not an identity they want to adopt or communicate to their peers. For other students/groups (including many recent-immigrant students, according to the article), free food is perceived as a good thing/without social stigma, among the peers who matter to them.
As one of my friend’s high school kids said, “At school, no matter how people dress, you know at lunchtime who’s got money and who doesn’t. The rich kids walk off campus to get lunch at the fast food places, and the poor kids stay on campus and eat mystery meat.”
While the physical cafeteria layout is a simple, obvious fact to any passerby, it tends to get dismissed by the adult school authorities. Some adults don’t notice it, or if they do, they don’t see it as important. Others understand it’s an issue but don’t want to stir up controversy by trying to change it, or don’t believe that there’s a better solution.
A few books on office layout and how it can influence behavior:
Offices at Work
New Workspace, New Culture
Environmental Psychology