I have not seen my friend Robert for several months. He is an interesting character and much more interested in people than am I. He is also braver in some respects. I watched him over a period of several weeks when he was investigating "human nature," or so he called it. He was completely unembarrassed to play roles while interviewing people or while testing their reactions. I would have been too embarrassed to try, but he was not ruffled in the least. He can tell the most enormous lies with a straight face, and after watching his experiments for a while, I realized I could never be sure if he was telling me the truth or not. There was nothing malicious about him, but there would always be a question for me as to whether I had become the subject of an experiment or not in the future.
Robert was a psychology major who was really dedicated to testing ideas he had about how people behaved, and he was always ready to act out a role in order to get an answer. He became interested in how people react not to the person but to their mode of dress. He said he wanted to show me how people behaved differently in social situations according to how the other person with whom they are interacting is dressed. I was perfectly willing to accept that this was so, but Robert insisted on proving it--he always has some idea he wants to prove, and he is never happy to have you just believe him. I suppose this will one day make him a good researcher, and it could also make him a good teacher.
Robert told me that people do not necessarily make big changes in their behavior when they are confronted with someone who is not well groomed, but they do behave somewhat differently. Robert described situations from his own experience in changing appearance to show that the results depend on the specific situation and the degree of training of the other people involved. He said he would prove it to me--I said he did not have to, but in some way ...