Viral “Shopping Cart Test” Says A Lot About You

Just the other day I had a really good laugh with a colleague here at the radio station. He told me that he was at the grocery store over the weekend and saw someone that is a mutual acquaintance. He shared that as he was driving off in the parking lot, he noticed this acquaintance didn't put their shopping cart back in the little cart corral. Clearly, this was a testament to their character--right? I'm sure there's a Jerry Seinfeld bit on this.

Little did I know that just a few days later, I would come across a viral theory, if you will. It's the "Shopping Cart Theory". Could this simple "test" speak volumes of your character? If you've ever studied Philosophy or Ethics, you're familiar with these types of experiments that measure moral psychology or decision-making. Is this legitimate?

You're wrapping up a long grocery shopping trip on a Saturday afternoon and it's time to go home. You've unloaded all of those heavy, over-stuffed grocery bags into the car and now you're about to make the biggest decision that you've made all day: do you take that shopping cart back to the corral where the car belongs OR do you leave it?

A popular reddit thread, shown below, is an extreme conversation starter:

I'm all for taking the shopping cart back to its corral and I absolutely HATE parking next to carts that are two-wheels up into the vegetation or even worse, just sitting there waiting to roll into the side of your car.

How do YOU behave with your shopping carts and do you think it can say something about ones character?