Bickman’s basic procedure was to ask passersby on the street to comply with some odd request (for example, to pick up a discarded paper bag or stand on the other side of a bus-stop sign). In half of the instances, the requester, a young man, was dressed in ordinary street clothes; in the rest, he wore a security guard’s uniform. Regardless of the type of request, many more people obeyed the requester when he was wearing the guard costume. Similar results were obtained when the requester was female.
