Study: “No-guns” signs cause negative reactions, and not just among CHL-holders

According to a new academic study, and as reported in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, ‘no-guns’ signs have a negative emotional effect on whomever passes by -- employees and customers alike.

Stephen Morgan, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Concordia University-St. Paul, told the newspaper he felt "weird and ill at ease" whenever he passed one of those signs. So he decided to find out whether other people felt the same way.

From the story:

Morgan conducted an experiment in which he added one of the signs to a building entrance, then asked students to rate the emotional value of a set of photographs of people's faces. He used some stock photographs that had been "validated" by researchers as showing a set range of emotions -- sad, angry, happy, etc. All things being equal, people rated those photographs the same way.

Morgan's test group -- those who did not walk by the "bans guns" sign -- rated the faces in the standard way.

But students who had walked by the sign rated the faces as "significantly more negative" than the test group. The angry faces were rated as more angry, the sad faces were rated as more sad, and the happy faces were rated as less happy.

Morgan said these negative ratings are a subtle measure of the emotions of persons taking the test. In psychology, it is called projection -- negative people interpret their environment in a negative way.

That means that walking by these signs makes people feel bad, creating a less hospitable work environment, more prone to feelings of anger, frustration and resentment.

Ohio businesses now have all they need to support their decision to remove their discriminatory, unsafe and “negative” signs.