International travelers confronting the age-old question of "to tip or not to tip" can find new insights in a study published by Michael Lynn, associate professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration.

Lynn reviewed the tipping customs in 21 countries and found that tipping is more common in countries where citizens score high on personality traits associated with extroversion and sociability and low on traits indicating introversion and reserve.

Lynn's study, "National Personality and Tipping Customs," to be published in the December 1999 issue of Personality and Individual Differences, looks at the relationship between the number of service professions it is customary to tip and the average personality scores of the people in the 21 countries.

Lynn found that nations identified as having relatively extroverted populations, such as Greece, Mexico and the United States, tended to have many tipped professions. "The reason tipping is more common in extroverted countries may have to do with the value extroverts place on the social effects of tipping," Lynn said. "Extroverts are outgoing and sociable, so they should like the attentive treatment that tipping motivates servers to provide."

The number of tipped professions also was greater in countries scoring high in traits associated with anxiety, among them Egypt, Spain and Italy. Lynn observed that the prevalence of tipping in those countries "suggests that one of the functions of tipping may be to reduce people's anxieties about being served by strangers."

Countries registering more introverted tendencies, such as Australia, Hong Kong and India, tended to have fewer tipped professions, Lynn added.

Lynn noted, "The results of this study are important not only because they shed light on the social functions of tipping, but also because they demonstrate that personality traits can be used to predict and understand social customs as well as the behaviors of individuals."

To obtain the results of his study, Lynn applied regression analysis to published data from two sources. National personality was measured by the average scores within nations on

the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). These national averages were assembled from many sources by Richard Lynn (no relation to Michael Lynn) and Terence Martin and published in a 1995 article in Personality and Individual Differences (issue 19). The number of tipped professions within nations was obtained from Nancy Star's International Guide to Tipping (Berkeley Books, 1998).

For a copy of the study and to talk with Lynn about it and related studies on consumer tipping, contact him at (607) 255-8271, e-mail: wml3@cornell.edu.