In recent years, there has been considerable interest in national stereotypes and the extent to which they are valid. Ever since Biggott (1967) reported that French shoppers were significantly more likely to push into a bus queue than were Swiss shoppers, studies have been performed that appear to show that reliable cross-cultural differences exist in what is considered "acceptable" behaviour, even within the Western "developed" nations. For example, Raciste, Morone and Kruelle (2000) recently presented evidence that people from Alsace are significantly more likely to consider dog-beating acceptable than are people from Labrador. Wikked and Hartless (2001) found that 95% of Welsh interviewed claimed that they had watched ritual poodle-drowning; in contrast, 68% of Swedes claimed to find this practice abhorrent. One problem with all of these studies is that, with the exception of the original work by
Biggott, they rely on responses to questionnaires: given that there is often some disparity between what people say they do and their actual behaviours (ThynKin, SeyYing and Doowing 1978), the questionnaire studies may have overestimated the strength of these cultural variations.
One behaviour which has attracted considerable interest is sun-bed claiming: the establishment of priority of access to a sun-bed at a resort by means of placing a towel on it. While there have been previous studies of this phenomenon, they are either so old that cultural practices might have changed in the meantime (e.g., Buonaparte and Nelson's (1805) study of sun-bed claiming behaviour on the Western European coast) or they have failed to use objective behavioural measurements (e.g. as in Krapp and Fewtile's (1966) study, in which individuals of two countries were asked to give ratings of the acceptability of each other's toenail-clipping behaviour). Also, previous studies have failed to take account of the age of the participants, and yet recent research has shown this to be