Masks have become the custom among restaurant workers and bartenders as a form of protection against COVID-19. Yet, given the rapid introduction of masks to the uniforms of restaurant servers there is a dearth of extant scholarship that has explored the effects of face coverings on customers’ behaviors. In response, this research offers a preliminary test of the effect of server masks on a common consumer behavior in the full-service restaurant industry—tipping. We review theoretical and empirical reasons suggesting that a mask may have a negative effect on customers’ tipping practices. Potential mask effects on tipping are then explored with a survey experiment that was administered to a large and diverse sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk “workers.” Our results suggest that wearing a mask is not likely to, on average, have a meaningful effect on how much restaurant customers tip their servers. However, we do observe a negative indirect effect of a mask on customer reported tip amount through diminished perceptions of a hypothetical servers’ friendliness. This effect was found to be attenuated among those who are altruistically motivated to tip servers as a way to help them financially. The implications of our results and directions for future research are discussed.

作为抵御 COVID-19 的一种保护形式，戴口罩已成为餐厅工作人员和调酒师的习俗。然而，鉴于口罩迅速被引入餐厅服务员的制服中，现有的学术研究缺乏探索面罩对顾客行为的影响。作为回应，这项研究初步测试了服务员面具对全方位服务餐厅行业常见消费者行为——给小费的影响。我们回顾了表明口罩可能对顾客的小费行为产生负面影响的理论和经验原因。然后，通过对大量不同的 Amazon Mechanical Turk“工人”样本进行的调查实验，探索了面具对小费的潜在影响。我们的结果表明，平均而言，戴口罩不太可能，对餐厅顾客给服务员小费的多少产生了有意义的影响。但是，我们确实观察到面具对客户报告的小费金额有负面的间接影响，因为它会降低对假设服务器友好性的看法。在那些出于利他主义动机而给服务员小费以在经济上帮助他们的人中，这种效果会减弱。讨论了我们的结果和未来研究方向的意义。