The Psychological Case Against Tipping

New York Magazine:

Welcome to the weirdness of tipping in America. It carries with it such a strong psychological pull that many consumers are unwilling to abandon it, and in light of recent estimates that 58 percent of a server’s income comes from tips, it seems as though there are considerable economic issues to untangle before many others follow Meyer’s lead.

The basic idea behind tipping, of course, is that service workers are getting rewarded for doing a good job, but the science simply doesn’t back this up. There’s decades’ worth of consumer-psychology research demonstrating that tipping hardly improves service at all. Michael Lynn, a Cornell University professor and one of the nation’s leading experts on the psychology of tipping, has studied this at length.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine