COMING SOON!
(should be out by the first quarter of 2026)
The Psychology of Tipping
Scientific Insights for Services Customers, Workers, and Managers
Table of Contents
1. More than Small Change (Who cares about tipping? Why? What should they know?)
Tipping is a worldwide behavior involving the transfer of billions of dollars annually from consumers to service workers. It impacts not only those consumers and workers, but also businesses and policy makers. This chapter discusses the reasons that each of these groups care about tipping and what kinds of information about it they need to know. Finally, it describes academic researchers’ interest in studying tipping and my qualifications to share what we have learned with readers.
2. Beyond Gratitude & Gratuity (Why do, or don’t, people tip?)
Understanding the motives that drive tipping is key to predicting and influencing this behavior. This chapter presents evidence that people tip to help servers earn a living, reward good service, get or keep good future service, get or keep social approval, and fulfill a sense of obligation. It also presents evidence that tipping is constrained by desires to save money and concerns about its status implications. Common misperceptions about these motives for and against tipping are discussed along with the practical implications of these motives and misperceptions for all the stakeholders described in Chapter 1.
3. Big-Tippers & Stiffers (Who gives the best tips, and who gives worst?)
Service workers are not shy about sharing their perceptions of who are good and bad tippers, but are those perceptions accurate? This chapter answers that question by contrasting those perceptions with what research tells us about individual and group differences in tipping. The chapter starts with an examination of potential demographic predictors of tipping such age, sex, race, religion, income, and nationality. Then it moves on to potential behavioral-trait predictors such as smoking, patronage frequency, and work history. Finally, it ends with an examination of potential personality differences in tipping. Ultimately, it concludes that the reviewed group differences in tipping are too small to (i) justify server discrimination against any group, or (ii) support server and consumer inferences about the character of people based on their tipping.
4. A Time for Tips (When do people tip more, and when less?)
If there is a time for everything, what is the time for tipping? When do people tip more? … or less? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by reviewing research on temporal differences in tipping. It starts with time-of-day effects and moves on to consider day-of-week effects, monthly/seasonal effects, and holiday effects. The main takeaways are that temporal differences in tipping do exist, but they are rarely large or consistent across service contexts and they have few practical implications that are not already well known.
5. A Place for Tips (How and why does tipping vary across geographic areas?)
Geography is not “destiny” as some have claimed, but geography does influence tipping. This chapter explores urban vs rural, state and national differences in tipping, their potential explanations, and their implications for service businesses and traveling consumers. One of several takeaways is that public media descriptions of geographic differences in tipping are more inconsistent and error prone than most people realize. Wise consumers of this information will remember that it is generally better to look at the agreements between, and/or the average of, several different tipping guides, press articles, and websites sources than to rely upon any one source alone.
6. Perk of the Job (Why do we tip some service occupations and not others?)
Many service occupations, such as bartenders, doormen, hotel maids, parking valets, and restaurant servers, commonly receive tips, while others, such as accountants, bank tellers, copy machine operators, doctors, and lawyers, are rarely if ever tipped. What differentiates these sets of services? Why are some occupations more likely to be tipped than others? This chapter seeks to answer these questions. It reviews evidence that occupational tipping norms are not arbitrary, but reflect the effects of occupational characteristics on consumers’ motivation to tip and on firms’ and workers’ willingness to let them do it.
7. Unequal Pay (Who gets the best tips and who gets the worst?)
Tipping compensates some workers substantially more than others even when the services they provide are comparable. Knowing who gets the biggest (and smallest) tips would benefit workers, businesses, and consumers alike, so this chapter looks at how average tip percentages co-vary with the recipients’ sexes, ages, races, physical appearances, work-experiences, work attitudes, and personalities. Although there are meaningful effects of server demographics and appearance, the data suggest that no server characteristic is really critical to getting good tips. Instead, servers’ average tip percentages are determined by the unique combination of many traits that each server brings to the table.
8. Mega Tips (How can service workers get larger tips?)
Approximately 4 million workers in the United States derive at least part of their compensation in the form of tips, so would benefit from learning strategies and tactics to increase that tip income. Managers and executives in tipped industries also stand to benefit from learning how to increase their employees’ tips, because better compensated workers tend to be happier, more productive, and less prone to quit. Consumers too might benefit from learning the techniques that tipped workers use to extract more money out of their wallets. Given its utility, researchers have devoted a fair amount of effort studying this issue. This chapter summarizes what they have learned. At the heart of the chapter are 20 specific, easy to perform worker behaviors that have been proven to increase tips. Also covered are 7 specific things managers can do to increase their employees’ tips.
9. Winners & Losers (Who does tipping benefit and who does it harm? How?)
Although tipping is often portrayed as pitting the interests of consumers, workers, and/or businesses against one another, the truth is that tipping is a mixed bag of benefits and harms for all parties involved and that no generalizable claims about is goodness or badness for any of the parties mentioned above are possible. This chapter will explain why I say this by reviewing evidence about all the pros and cons of tipping from a consumer, worker, and business perspective. In doing so, it will also provide you with the knowledge to form your own educated opinion.
10. Cornucopia of Controversies (What controversies arise from tipping? What should people know about them?)
Tipping has generated several longstanding and nascent controversies. Among those controversies are disagreements about the moral status of tipping, the boundaries of a social obligation to tip, the desirability of a subminimum wage for tipped workers, the fairness of tip pooling, the desirability of exempting tip income from taxation, and the impact and desirability of digital tipping screens. This chapter identifies the key considerations and ideas underlying each controversy along with relevant facts so that you can form your own educated opinion.
11. Past as Prologue (How did tipping get where it is? How might it change going forward?)
History sets the context for the present and knowledge of the past helps us predict and shape the future. Accordingly, although I am neither a historian nor futurist, I share what I know and think about these issues in this concluding chapter. The upshot is that we know little about the global origins of tipping, but more about the history of tipping in America. Tipping was rare in the U.S. outside of major cities prior to 1840 and did not become common until after the Civil War, when wealthy U.S. travelers to Europe supposedly brought the custom back home with them. The custom was widely opposed and was even briefly outlawed in several states, but rapidly took hold and evolved with the customary restaurant tip in the U.S. increasing from 10 percent of the bill in the early 1900’s to 15 percent in the middle of the century, and 20 percent at the end of the century. Recent increases in tip-flation, tip-creep, and tip-fatigue raise questions about the future of tipping, so I explain why I believe that tipping is unlikely to ever be abolished in this country.