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to the same place viz. your own.

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Originally posted by babthrower:

Hmmm 4.

Your at university doing a master's in sociology one the subject of, say, class or ethnic prejudices, and set one would be:

- addressed in crayon, crudely printed, smudged with dirt, mis-spellings of the street name, and the stamp upside-down, or

- the addressee's name clearly belongs to the subject ethnic group

And set #2 would be pristine or Anglo-Saxon.

and you would drop an equal number of each set.

Then you could count how many of each you received and draw your conclusions on the assumption that people wanted or did not want to help the addressee based on the regard they had for the class or ethnic group by troubling to re-mail the letters.

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The responses give some indication of the sentiments of the people in the area where you dropped the letters.Those who are against the supposed thinking of the addressee won't be minded to post the letter whereas those who do tend to favour it will assist by posting.

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US psychologist Stanley Milgram is probably best known for his 1960s experiment at Yale University showing people's willingness to follow orders from someone in authority - even to the extent of giving seemingly lethal electric shocks to innocent victims (see They made me do it). Less celebrated is the ingenious method he devised in the mid-1960s for gauging public opinion without conducting a formal poll.

Milgram and his research assistants "accidentally" dropped 300 stamped and addressed envelopes in phone boxes, shops and on pavements all over New Haven, Connecticut. The addresses were identical apart from the first line, which read either "Medical Research Associates", "Friends of the Nazi Party" or "Friends of the Communist Party". Milgram predicted that people's likelihood of picking up and posting the envelopes would depend on how much they were in sympathy with the values implied by the recipient. The people of New Haven turned out to have little taste for extreme political views: they returned about 70 per cent of the envelopes for the Medical Research Associates, compared with 25 per cent for either of the Party Friends.

The technique was not without problems - such as helpful passers-by frequently spotting an envelope being dropped and handing it back to the researcher - so Milgram experimented with different methods. Once he hired a light aircraft to drop envelopes over Worcester, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, many of the envelopes ended up on rooftops, and others put the plane in danger when they were swept into the ailerons of its wings.

Despite such setbacks, the envelope-dropping method has stood the test of time and is still employed by social psychologists to ascertain public opinion. Recent drops have examined attitudes to abortion, President Clinton's impeachment and Arab-Israeli relations. In 1999, school student Lucas Hanft dropped 1600 letters in Manhattan and Nassau County, addressed to fictitious organisations that supported or opposed gay marriage. Hanft discovered city inhabitants were more liberal than suburbanites but was also threatened with arrest for littering.