Diversity and Good Service

In a discussion of the Hampton Inn’s policy of allowing a free stay if a customer is not satisfied, it occurred to me that this kind of guarantee likely varies based on the demographics of the hotel’s guests. Similar guarantees likely also vary based on the degree of similarity between the customers and the seller. Unity, social solidarity, and a sense of shared destiny are necessary so that cheaters don’t take advantage of such common, though easily abused, offers.

Most traditional notions of honor, good manners, and the like seem to be aimed at addressing exactly these kinds of problems. For example, if everyone were like Mr. Pink, the entire profit model of waitressing would break down. Instead, most people tip, even when they don’t expect to be repeat customers. Most of us don’t take a bunch of papers out of the newspaper machine, even when we’re able (and even when we’re afforded the opportunity to do so). We don’t show up at the all-you-can-eat buffet with a 5 gallon bucket, even when we’re allowed to take home a take-out box at Luby’s.

In a world where people have no honor, a sense that getting an unfair advantage is beneath them, everything breaks down. This is, to some extent, the theme of Francis Fukuyama’s “Trust” a few years ago.

I imagine, as a matter of evolutionary biology, this sense off trust is actually quite natural and regular. Without it, social life would be too difficult to sustain. If a bunch of ants can, through instinct, all find their way to the Snickers Bar you dropped and still share morsels with the queen and the little baby ants, human beings, who are far more complex and equally social, can learn similar good habits. They have learned that it’s important to (a) instill habits of cooperation and sociability at an early age (b) ostracize anti-social and selfish behavior and condemn such behavior in our selves.

Overlayed with this was a strong sense of the “in” group and the “out” group. Thus, people that can get together for a barn-raising, also could find themselves poisoning the wells and burning down the villages of an outside group when that group proved a threat. And human beings could reconcile this all with some notion of “good behavior.”

Adam Smith had this all figured out, at least implicitly, a long time ago in his companion works, “A Theory of Moral Sentiments” and “Wealth of Nations.” He knew that these twin impulses, avarice and moral sense and sympathy, worked together to create wealth but also that self-interest did not devolve into an internecine struggle for scraps. Of course, culture and history plays a large part in all of this. In a nation of countrymen with some shared sense of Us and Them, it’s easier not to rip one another off. A great deal of literature in the western world is concerned with teaching the beauty of this kind of cooperative behavior including tales like George Washington and his Cherry Tree or Aesop’s Fables. Breaches of hospitality have always loomed large in diverse cultures as a serious evil and have been condemned in song and story, e.g., Macbeth, Odysseus.

Fractured nations with strong subcultures and “diverse” groupings of people have less trust and must take more steps to ensure they’re not hussled and ripped off by deals that only work among people with some honor flowing from a sense of shared destiny and kinship. The only reason this guarantee works is because most people staying at that kind of hotel have some decency to begin with, and becaue America is a nation, even now, with relatively high degrees of trust. You will be less likely to find such trust in diverse settings; recall the mutual hostility of Korean shop-owners and African-Americans in South Central Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 riots. Surely their ethnic, cultural, language, and other differences had a great deal to do with it.

In other words, in a world with too much diversity, expect worse service and less trust.