USPS & Berlin's Atheist Shoes

          

  Out of curiosity, I researched some modern examples of Stanley Milgram’s Lost Letter Experiment, explained in Chapter 9 of Sampson’s book, Great American City.  I ran into an article posted around 2 years ago regarding Atheist Shoes, a small German atheist shoe company based in Berlin.  The German shoemakers noticed that their packages to customers in the US were missing at an alarmingly high rate.  They presumed it was because their packages were wrapped with packing tape labeled “ATHEIST”.  Since their enquiries with the US Post Service remained ignored, the article states the shoe company proceeded with applying Stanley Milgram’s Lost Letter Experiment to see if the delays were because the US Postal Service took offence of their “overt godlessness”. 

           

In this experiment, parcels were put in to the post rather than following Milgram’s original technique of dropping them on the floor.  There were two groups of packages sent to 89 people in 49 US states.  Each customer was sent two packages, one was sealed in neutral tape, the other sealed with Atheist-branded packing tape.  All 178 packages left Berlin on November 21, 2012, and were presumed to travel at the same speed.  For the atheist-branded parcels, it took 3 days longer for atheist-branded parcels to reach their destinations, 9 of which went missing in comparison to only 1 non branded parcel, and this group was ten times more likely to disappear.  The article included they found that an atheist-branded parcel took over a month to arrive in Michigan.  Their findings also demonstrated high rates of delayed packages and ones that never arrived in more liberal, traditionally less religious states.  The shoemakers had run control tests in Germany and Europe, which showed no bias in the handling of each group of packages.  Since excluding the use of atheist-packing tape on their US shipments, the shoe company found improved delivery times. 

            I thought it was interesting the way this experiment played out.  It’s possible that every USPS location in this study displayed neighborhood level variation in handling explicitly anti-religious packages, like the example of the delayed package in Michigan.  Some USPS locations may be situated in neighborhoods where its employees are more or less sensitive to sending a package that does not conform to the area’s dominant sect.  I find that this study also shows global level variation in the handling of overtly atheist packages.  Given that the shoe company’s control tests in Germany and Europe did not display the kind of bias seen in the US, one can get an idea of how postal services in other nations handle packages that are affiliated with a religious minority group. 

            It seems that USPS employees are more likely to handle neutral packages with higher priority than packages that display nonconformist associations.  The atheist-branded packages in this study can be viewed similarly to Milgram’s Communist and Nazi party group of letters, in that people show less interest in ensuring the owner receives their belongings when there is some form of evidence that the receiver goes against popular culture.  The latter study only involves the actions of USPS employees, which makes it difficult to assess whether their actions equate to that of all the citizens in each location.  However, assumptions could be made on the kinds of values and practices that vary in the neighborhoods of each USPS location that make an employee more inclined to tamper with a package.  One can also reason that USPS employees may discriminate on the handling of packages based on nonreligious reasons, like placing stereotypes on the last names stated on the address and therefore placing less priority on sending packages on top of the nonreligious explicitness.      

Other than USPS employees, I would say that there are factors outside of the postal company that could explain the disappearance of packages.  Perhaps the communities of where the packages are dropped off have high rates of theft; maybe robbers that want to prove some type of point to atheists steal the atheist-branded packages out of spite.  There could also be issues regarding the processing of the packages prior to even reaching USPS.  But from the findings offered from the article, since the bias found in USPS was not seen in the shoe company’s control tests in Europe and Germany, it is suggested that the US seems to struggle with selective distribution of packages more so than do other nations.  The versatile ways in applying the methodology of Milgram’s Lost Letter Experiment to other modern day studies outside of the neighborhood level help to make informed inferences on the tendencies of certain societies.    

The article stated in this post can be found here: Modern day, real life demonstration of the lost letter technique exposes discrimination against atheism in the US Postal Service

References: Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press.