The Broken Door: Do College Students Pay Attention To Signs?

Submitted By zeekcamero
Words: 691
Pages: 3

Samantha Krejci
The Broken Door: Do College Students actually pay attention to signs? The typical stereotype of college students is that they’re careless and don’t pay much attention to their surrounding’s because their mind is focused on something more important. My group and I decided to test this stereotype by coming up with an experiment that challenges them to acknowledge their surroundings completely. We decided to put a “broken/out of order” sign on a door that gets a lot of traffic going through it to see if the student actually pays attention to the sign or not. There are two different signs that we created; one color and one black and white. We questioned, “Will the student pay attention to the sign and ignore the door or ignore the sign and still walk through the door?” Our hypothesis is that the student will ignore the sign and still walk through the door. The second part of our hypothesis was that the sign that had color to it would be more acknowledged than a black and white sign. We decided to test this hypothesis at prime lunch hour’s 12-1pm at the most popular places on campus; the library and student center. The methodology of the experiment started with printing out each sign and taping it to a door we thought would get more traffic to the building. We ran each experiment for 10 minutes and counted separately the number of people that went to another door and the number of people who went through the door with the broken door sign on it. Mike, Raven, and I took turns counting people, keeping time, and hanging the signs. We ran the experiment over a course of 3 days, 3 times at each location. The results of the experiment not only shocked us but reassured us that our hypothesis was for the most part right. A good amount of college students attending Kent State ignored the sign and entered the “broken door” anyways. Also, the black and white sign was ignored more than the colored one. Even though we thought more students would ignore the sign, a good deal of them still didn’t acknowledge a broken door sign. Over the course of 3 days and 3 trials each day with the black and white sign a total of 336 students entered the library. A total of 20.2% of those students ignored the sign and still entered through the “broken door”. In the student center a total of 331 students entered the building, and a whopping total of 24.5% students ignored the sign and still entered the “broken door”. On the other hand, the colored sign was more acknowledged. A total of 452 students entered the library over the course of our experiment and only 8%