Littering: What Would You Do?

And so began a conversation that lasted a total of 17 minutes. Our female litterbug continued to throw her trash on the boardwalk even while the young man tried valiantly to persuade her to clean up her act.

When nothing else appeared to be working, the young man tried a little flattery.

"Come on, you're too pretty to litter," he said.

But she wasn't buying it.

The young man's exasperation was starting to show as his questions became more pointed and personal.

"You do this around your house, too?" he asked. "What does your house look like?"

The litterbug gave him a dirty look.

Finally, a man with seemingly inexhaustible patience had reached his limit. He knelt down and practically begged the litterbug to let him throw away some of her trash.

"I'll take care of everything. Don't worry," she assured him.

But the young man was unconvinced and picked up as much trash as he could carry to a nearby trash can.

"Enjoy your day, all right?" he said.

We later learned that the young man, Bryan Gleason, is a Long Beach lifeguard and someone to whom the environment is very dear.

"I lived on the beach my whole life," he told us. "I live in Costa Rica in the wintertime. I hate seeing people litter. It is just the way I was brought up."

Adrienne Gelo, the actor playing our female litterbug, was amazed at Gleason's persistence.

"He was really concerned," she said. "He wanted to make sure that everything that I was throwing away, if I had no more use for it, he was going to throw it away for me."

Carrie Keating, a psychology professor at Colgate University, said Gleason appeared to be trying to form a relationship with Gelo, "for whatever his purpose might be."

"Primetime" asked Gleason whether he would have devoted so much time to a litterbug who was not an attractive young woman.

"I would definitely, you know, have said something," Gleason said. But, he admitted, "I might not have sat there for 20 minutes."

'Minding My Own Business'

Gleason was certainly the exception. On this day, 136 people walked by without saying anything to our two litterbugs. Just nine people stopped to intervene, including three older couples who weren't amused by the mess on their boardwalk.