“Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup!”: tipping behavior in restaurants as a function of food servers’ humor, opinion conformity, and other-enhancement

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this field experiment was to examine whether food servers who used other-enhancement, opinion conformity, or humor would be rewarded with higher tips from restaurant customers than food servers who did not use such ingratiation tactics. Consistent with predictions, humor and simple opinion conformity resulted in significantly higher tip percentages compared to the control condition. In contrast, other-enhancement (i.e., compliments) and exaggerated opinion conformity did not. Humor also resulted in higher tips than all other tactics, except simple opinion conformity. These results and their implications are discussed.