Current Event Project-1

This document summarizes an experiment where a piano staircase was installed in a subway station in Stockholm, Sweden. The staircase played a different musical note when pressure was applied to each step. The goal was to observe if more people would use the stairs instead of the escalator. In the initial experiment without the piano staircase, most people used the escalator. With the piano staircase, 66% of people used the stairs. However, the experiment only lasted a short time, so long-term effects on behavior change could not be determined. Researchers at the University of Eindhoven then conducted their own follow up "Social Stairs" experiment to address limitations of the original study.

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Current Event Project-1

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Marit van Megesen

AP Statistics, period 2
Mrs Saleem
October 30th, 2018

Article link: http://www.experientialdesignlandscapes.com/files/peeters-pt13.pdf

Piano staircase Experiment

The article is about an experiment because there is a treatment actively

imposed to observe the response. The treatment being imposed on the people
walking through the Odenplan subway in station in Stockholm, Sweden is a piano
staircase that plays a different musical note when pressure is applied. The response
that is being observed is if more people would use the stairs instead of the escalator.

This article mainly talks about the effects of the piano staircase. Their main
goal in this experiment is to change people’s behavior in the long-term to take the
stairs in favor of the escalator. They have conducted their first experiment, the piano
staircase, and then observed the data they’ve received. After that they have
conducted another experiment (the social stairs), while also being a survey because
they’re interviewing people about the social stairs, to improve their data about
people’s behavior. My paper is mainly focused on the first experiment.

 Population of interest:
 People taking the escalator. The goal is to change their behavior
 Experimental units:
 The people walking through the Odenplan subway in station in
Stockholm, Sweden

The parameter of this experiment the proportion of people taking the stairs instead of
the escalator. They’re trying to discover if more people would take the stairs instead
of the escalator by making the stairs more interesting and fun.

The process of the design was very easy and simple. Volkswagen, the
company that helped make this experiment possible, started with a day of observing
people without a staircase. This is the control group, which is needed to compare the
other treatment group with. In this group most of the people took the escalator
instead of the staircase. After they have gathered this data they took a few days to
create the piano case itself. They have put pressure sensors and musical note boxes
that will activate once pressure is applied on each staircase, with each one being a
different musical note. After this has been completed it was time to gather the data of
the treatment group. This video covers what has been done and observed in the
experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw. Once the data has
been gathered, Volkswagen did an analysis of the data and claimed that 66% of the
people used the piano staircase instead of the escalator. This assumption can be
made since it is an experiment but is not entirely true for all the other subway places
in the place, since it’s a small sample of the population.

Flaws and misuses in the experiment

The researchers of the University of Eindhoven, based in the Netherlands,
have made another experiment based on the piano staircase experiment. They have
evaluated the piano staircase experiment and noticed some limitations, flaws, and
misuse of the experiment and wanted to build upon the results to get an ever better
and deeper understanding of the changes of behavior in people.

What can be noticed in the piano staircase experiment is that:

 Longitude of the experiment
 The piano staircase experiment was executed for a short amount of
time. Therefore there might be many confounding variables that could
have been present that could have affected the data. Examples could
be the weekday, the weather, the time of the year (holidays, winter,
summer, etc.), and more which effect
 Long term impact on intrinsic motivation and behavior
 Additional to the previous bullet point, they couldn’t observe the long-
term impact of the piano staircase. Their main goal was to get the
intrinsic motivation (center/deep-rooted motivation), which cannot
have been observed in that short amount of time, and this leads to my
next point.
 How can we know if people will keep using the staircase? What of they come
there everyday? Will the piano staircase for the long run trigger them? Will
they eventually loose motivation and use the escalator again?
 We cannot just assume that when people use the staircase once they
will use it for the rest of their lives.

As mentioned in the beginning of the paragraph, the researchers of the University of

Eindhoven, based in the Netherlands, have made another experiment based on the
piano staircase experiment. This experiment is called the Social Stairs, the students
made this experiment to potentially block out all the confounding variables and
achieve the goal of changing someone’s behavior of using the elevator/escalator.
Their experiment is explained on pages 3-6 in the article, very informative about the
psychology of people’s behaviors and how the researcher can change their intrinsic
motivation.