Experiments in Hitch-hiking: What works best?

Jan 1, 2003 - © Bernd Wechner

Last year I marveled openly at the lack of research into hitch-hiking, given its ubiquity and how passionately opinionated people seem to be on the subject - it's either the greatest thing out or a certain suicide. Often people wonder just how well it works. How many people actually pull over? Or, better said, what portion of passing cars pulls over?

There was a period, from 1966 to 1975 where the diligent student will find a handful of studies that either set out to answer just this question or used hitch-hikers to study another (related) question. Not many, eight in all, made their way into my hands over recent years, three of which remained unpublished (and hence somewhat hard to find). I'd be pleased to learn of more, but for the moment this looks like all we have. Extracts from a golden age so to speak, when a handful of people took the subject seriously enough to conduct and report on some experiments using hitch-hikers as bait and drivers as quarry.

They are:

Baugher, Bob, 1974; unpublished personal letter.

Bryan, James H., 1966; Helping and Hitchhiking, unpublished manuscript, Princeton, New Jersey.

Clifford, Margaret M. and Cleary Paul, 1971; The Odds on Hitchhiking, unpublished manuscript, Wisconsin

Crassweller Peter, et. al., 1972; "An Experimental Investigation of Hitchhiking", The Journal of Psychology 82, pp. 43-47.

Morgan, Charles J. et. al., 1975; "Hitch-hiking - Social Signals at a Distance", Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 5, pp. 459-461.

Pomazal, Richard J. and Clore, Gerald L., 1973; "Helping on the Highway: the effects of dependency and sex", Journal of Applied Social Psychology 3, pp. 150-164.

Snyder, Mark et. al., 1974; "Staring and Compliance: a field experiment in hitchhiking", Journal of Applied Psychology 4, pp. 165-170.

Tobin, Nona and Sexton, Sam, 1972; Attitudes toward and the effects of physical variables on hitchhiking, unpublished masters thesis, California State University, San Jose.

I'd like to summarise just what these researchers did and their results. The studies are diverse, were executed in diverse locations and yielded a wide range of results. All but one researcher recorded the proportion of cars which pulled over (counting ride offers and passing cars). The one exception, Bryan, didn't count passing cars, but watched the clock (measured wait times). Tables 1-4 below summarises the results and practices succinctly.

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