One of the things the kids always say when you have to travel for work is to “bring us back something.” What this usually amounts to is a scavenger hunt of sorts in random airport gift shops, where I try to find something both interesting and uncommon to where I live. Things were no different when I was the kid and my father would travel though. I would also hope to get something neat and unique when Dad came home from a rare trip. I remember one such occasion where my dad returned from a trip to Chicago. He brought me back a small glass jar filled with dirt from Wrigley Field (the home of the Major League Baseball team Chicago Cubs). I still have that jar. It has no practical value, but there is something special about being able to say you own a piece of a place like that.
I believe many people will agree with me there, because I have heard of lots of tourists taking things from places they have visited. Some people take shells or even sand from a beach, for example. There are sometimes laws against this but they don’t usually stop most people from pilfering what they consider to be inconsequential knickknacks. An interesting example of this lies with the Petrified Forest National Park, which is covered with petrified wood. Many people visiting the park do take little bits of the “wood” home with them, even though they aren’t supposed to do this. But how do you stop people from doing this? You can’t police the whole area constantly.
Robert Cialdini, of Arizona State University, led a team that for weeks put up signs around the park telling people not to remove any chips of petrified wood. One sign simply said “Please don’t remove the petrified wood chips.” Another read “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the petrified forest.” Take a second and guess which sign was more effective at preventing people from taking wood.
If you guessed the first sign you were correct. It turns out that four times as many incidents occurred with the second sign vs. the first. But why is this? What makes the second sign so much less effective? It could be that the second sign is telling us that so many people are doing this. What would be wrong with you doing it too? Or maybe it sends a message to us that authorities are cracking down on this behavior, so it would be good to take a chip while you can.
One of the best places to see signs is the highway. We get bombarded with all kinds of advertisements and legal reminders when we are driving. There are quite a few states that have adopted a sign campaign designed to reduce the number of traffic accidents by revealing the number of traffic fatalities that have occurred in the present year. The purpose of these signs is clear. Drive safely and don’t add to this number. But does this method work? Are there fewer traffic accidents as a result of these kinds of signs? Not according to Joshua Madsen, a behavioral economist from the University of Minnesota.
“In the past decade, at least 28 U.S. states have started to display traffic fatality numbers to scare motorists into safer driving. But a new analysis of Texas car crashes co-authored by Madsen suggests such signs may actually be associated with more crashes, not fewer.”
With these examples you might ask yourself if signs work at all. Advertisers certainly believe so. In fact, the business of “sign spinning” is a relatively big one. You’ve heard of this I am sure. Someone is hired to hold a sign near a road advertising a business to passersby. They often spin the sign around or wave it at drivers to catch their attention. There have been studies to show the effectiveness of this kind of thing. One was done near Salt Lake City in 2018, where signs asking people to honk were placed near the road. In one setup only the sign was present. Another setup had a person holding the same sign. The final experiment had a person putting that sign into motion as drivers went by. Their results were very interesting. They found that when a person was with the sign (no movement), the amount of honks they received increased over the “sign-only” setup by 153 percent. The increase for the sign spinner setup was an impressive 168 percent. The implication is that signs can work much better when people are present.
You are more likely to get your point across when you are present.
The Pharisees were like signs with no one there. People had to come to them in the temple. They weren’t going to go to the unclean to deliver their message of the law. But Jesus knew that signs work better when the one giving the message is present. He was present with people of all kinds. He went to the lonely, the marginalized, and the reviled. He brought his message to everyone. The Gospel according to John has seven signs in it. The text actually uses the word “sign” instead of something like “miracle.” Have you ever wondered why that is? Here’s what I think: the whole point of a sign is for you to react to it. There is a purpose to a sign that tries to get you to do something or behave in some way. What is the purpose given for these signs in John? It is to believe.
John 20: 30-31
30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
The challenge to believe is given to the reader through these signs. It isn’t about the miracles, it is about the meaning behind them. And that’s a sign that really matters.
God Bless.