If somebody was wearing two different types of shoes on their feet, you’d notice, right? Well, a friend and I decided to put that to the test. Today at school, we switched one shoe with each other. The friend, who we’ll just call Ryan, wore two white Nike shoes while I wore two brown Van shoes. We switched one each, and ended up with a white Nike shoe on one foot and a brown Van shoe on the other. (Ryan had a bit of tight squeeze, because while I’m a size 7.5, he was a size 11.) As we paraded around school in our strange combination of shoes, we were surprised to notice that not many people commented. We traded shoes at around 9:20 AM, and kept them on until we traded once again at 2:20 PM, going back to our original shoes. That’s essentially five consecutive hours of wearing two different shoes. During that time, we went through four different periods in school, not including lunch. Ryan and I shared two of those four periods together, so if you assume that around 25 kids were in each class, that’s a total of 150 different people seeing our shoes, not including people that we walked passed in the hallways between classes and during lunch. That’s an astronomical amount of people. And the grand total of people that noticed and commented on our strange shoe set-up? Just eight between the two of us. That’s right, only 8 out of 150 people noticed and commented about the two different shoes we were wearing. Of course, there were quite a few people that noticed but just declined to say anything, but by going on just the people who commented, that’s around 5.3% of people noticing a small but very obvious change like that and actively saying something about it. There’s going to be some margin of era here, and obviously this was not a very controlled experiment at all, but there’s some solid number one can latch on to.
While these results may seem insignificant at best, what does this say about society, at least in school? Well, for one, people don’t have very good skills of observation. Most people don’t notice the little things, and our brain just brushes over details like two different shoes if they don’t really matter. So people really should stop worrying about how they look. Also, for the people that did notice but simply declined to comment, why? Why refuse to say anything? Is it societal pressures that stress, “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all,” or did you wish to not offend that person? Please, I’d be very interested to know: if you did see either me or Ryan today wearing two separate shoes, why didn’t you comment?
