Levine invested a great deal of time and effort in making these tests as scientific as possible. In the pen-dropping task, for instance, researchers made sure that they were able to walk consistently at a standard speed (1.5 paces per second) toward someone moving in the opposite direction; they also rehearsed naturally reaching into a pocket and, without appearing to notice, dropping a pen. When pretending to be blind, the researchers located themselves on street corners that had “crosswalks, traffic signals and moderate, steady pedestrian flow.” Stepping up to the corner when the lights turned green, the experimenters secretly timed how long it was before someone helped them cross the street.
Overall, they found that people in small towns in the Southeast were the most helpful, whereas those living in large towns in the Northeast were least likely to assist. Top of the “helping” list came Rochester, New York; Houston, Texas, was a close second; Nashville, Tennessee, third; and Memphis, Tennessee, fourth. The least helpful in the United States can be found in Patterson, New Jersey, and the second- and third-lowest positions go to New York and Los Angeles, respectively.
The results from the lost-letter test proved especially interesting. In New York, the letters were sometimes returned with angry and abusive comments scrawled on them. As Levine notes when describing the experiment in his book
The Geography of Time:
“Only from New York did I receive an envelope which had its entire side ripped and left open. On the back of the letter the helper had scribbled, in Spanish: ‘
Hijo de puta iresposable
’—which, translated, makes a very nasty accusation about my mother. Below that was a straightforward English-language ‘F____ You.’”
In Rochester it was different. One anonymous Good Samaritan wrote a very pleasant note to accompany the lost letter, adding a postscript that is reminiscent of Milgram’s original work into small worlds. The envelope asked Levine: “Are you related to any Levines in New Jersey or Long Island?”
Flushed by the success of their national study, Levine and his colleagues decided to go global.
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They traveled the world, visiting capital cities in twenty-three countries. They dropped more than four hundred pens, donned the leg braces more than five hundred times, and lost about eight hundred letters. The lost-letter technique proved a cross-cultural nightmare. In Tel Aviv, packages and letters lying on the ground, or placed on car windshields, are often associated with bombs, and so were given a wide berth by almost everyone. In El Salvador, they generated suspicion because they often form part of a well-known scam in which, as soon as someone picks up the letter, a man approaches and claims that the letter is his, that it contains some money, that the money is now missing, and so would the finder like to hand over his or her own hard-earned cash? Some other countries had no mailboxes or, as in Albania, no reliable postal system. However, despite the difficulties, the researchers persevered and eventually produced the international helping poll.
It proved to be good news for Latin America, with Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and San Jose (Costa Rica) heading the list of highly helpful countries. Lilongwe (Malawi) in Africa came in third. Singapore (Singapore), New York (United States), and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) filled the bottom three places. The differences were far from trivial. In Rio de Janeiro and Lilongwe, “blind” experimenters were helped across the street on every occasion, whereas in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur they encountered only a 50 percent success rate. In San Jose, 95 percent of people helped the experimenter sporting a leg brace to pick up the dropped magazines. In New York, the figure fell to just 28 percent.
Looking deeper into his data on helping in U.S. cities, Levine and his colleagues discovered that population density provided one of the best predictors of helping. Why should higher-population densities lead to less helping? According to one theory, developed by Milgram, people in high-population cities tend to experience a greater amount of “sensory overload.”
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They are constantly being bombarded with information from other people, their cell phones, traffic, and advertising. As a result, they do what all systems tend to do when receiving too much information—they set priorities, and they spend less time dealing with the sources competing for their attention. Milgram believed that situations are created in which people will walk past those in need of help, thus diverting onto others the responsibility to assist such individuals. All this creates a paradox: The greater the number of people occupying a space, the greater the sense of loneliness and isolation.
But Levine wasn’t just curious about the relationship between the size of a city and the help that citizens provided. He wondered whether helping or not is also determined by the speed of life in the city.
MEASURING THE PACE OF LIFE
Eager to put numbers to these seemingly elusive factors, Levine and his coworkers visited thirty-one countries and took three indicators of the speed of life.
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He measured the average walking speed of randomly selected pedestrians over a sixty-foot stretch of pavement, visited post offices and secretly timed how long it took them to serve a customer buying a single stamp, and took note of the accuracy of the clocks in fifteen randomly selected downtown banks.
The work was highly methodical. When measuring walking speed, the investigators ensured that all the locations were flat, free from obstruction, and not especially crowded. Children, those with obvious physical disabilities, and window-shoppers were excluded from the analyses. When timing the speed of service in post offices, the experimenters handed clerks a note written in the native language to help minimize potential cross-cultural confusion. Analyses showed that the three measures were all related to one another, suggesting that they did indeed provide an indicator of a city’s speed of life.
Levine combined the different indicators into a single measure of speed. The results revealed that Switzerland has the fastest pace of life in the world (Swiss bank clocks showed a discrepancy of just nineteen seconds); Ireland was second and Germany third. Interestingly, eight of the nine fastest countries were from Western Europe (Japan broke the total domination of the poll positions by coming in fourth). England was fifth, and had the fourth-highest walking speed of the entire list. The only Western European country involved in the study not to make it into the top ten was France (it came in eleventh, just behind Hong Kong), a result that Levine attributes to the measurements being taken at a time when the country was experiencing one of its hottest summers on record. The three slowest countries were Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. The bottom eight positions were all held by countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Within the United States, Boston proved to be the speediest (just beating New York to poll position), and Los Angeles the most laid back. The study also revealed more evidence of New Yorkers’ rudeness: It was only one of two cities where the experimenters were insulted by postal clerks (the other was Budapest).
Levine found some evidence that cities with a slower pace of life are more helpful. As predicted by Milgram’s “sensory overload” theory, the more people rush around, the less time they have to devote to factors that are peripheral to their main goals.
This is not the only downside of living in a fast-paced society. In the late 1980s, Levine and his team visited thirty-six cities across the United States to compare the pace of life with the city’s rate of death from coronary heart disease.
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The hypothesis was simple. People living in faster-paced cities were more likely to resemble the so-called Type A personality. This cluster of traits places great emphasis on urgency, competitiveness, and a general rushing around trying to achieve a great deal in very little time. Type A’s tend to talk fast and to complete other people’s sentences for them. They are often the first to finish at the dinner table, and they glance at their watches more frequently than most. Some researchers believe that this mode of living places a large number of stresses and strains on the body. Levine’s work showed that cities living life in the fast lane had higher numbers of smokers and increased rates of coronary heart disease. Further analyses showed that the speed of walking, and the percentage of people wearing watches in each city, were especially good predictors of the problem. Why is there such an unhealthy relationship between these factors? Perhaps Type A’s are attracted to fast-paced cities. Perhaps living in such speedy places causes people to become Type A’s. Perhaps it is a combination of the two. Whatever the explanation, the message is clear: In addition to making people less helpful to others, speed kills.
ALL TOGETHER NOW
Levine’s global measures of magazine, pen, and letter dropping suggest that population density and speed of life are not the only factors that influence levels of helping. Do you care about others or are you out for yourself? Some psychologists believe that the way in which people answer this question is, to a large extent, culturally determined. Some communities and countries have adopted a set of values that researchers refer to as “individualism.” These societies stress the needs and rights of the individual and place less emphasis on rewarding activities that benefit groups of people. At the other end of the spectrum is the collectivist approach, in which people view themselves as part of a larger group (be it family, organization, or an entire society), and tend to reward behavior that is for the greater good. Levine’s results contain tentative evidence that highly individualistic societies (such as the United States, Britain, and Switzerland) are less caring than collectives (such as Indonesia, Syria, and China). Other work suggests that the effect starts in our early years. When researchers asked four-year-old children to make up stories about their dolls, the narratives produced by Indonesian children included more friendly and helpful characters than those created by children from the United States, Germany, and Sweden.
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One of the most dramatic studies demonstrating the impact of living in a caring community was conducted by the social psychologist Philip Zimbardo.
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Like Stanley Milgram (who carried out the work into obedience, small worlds, envelope dropping, and television violence), Zimbardo’s experiments have stood the test of time. He is perhaps best known for his now infamous “prison” study. During this experiment, college students randomly assigned to the role of guards in a mock prison behaved in a highly sadistic way toward fellow students assigned the role of prisoners. Such high-profile research is not the only link between Zimbardo and Milgram. As children, they both attended James Monroe High School in the Bronx, New York, and at one stage even sat next to one another in several classes.
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Also, like Milgram, Zimbardo was interested in the psychology of helping.
His most striking contribution to the area examined the effects of community on antisocial behavior. Zimbardo secretly filmed what happened when he left a used car unlocked with its hood up on a street opposite New York University. After just ten minutes, a passing car stopped and a family got out. The mother quickly removed items of value from the interior of the car, the father removed the radiator with a hacksaw, and their child rooted through the trunk. About fifteen minutes later, another two men jacked up the car and removed its tires. Over the next few hours, other people stripped the vehicle until nothing of value remained. In just two days, Zimbardo secretly filmed more than twenty instances of destruction (mostly committed by middle-class white adults in broad daylight), and the resulting carnage was so bad that two trucks were required to remove the wrecked car from the street.
Zimbardo then left a similar car (again with its hood raised) in a location that had a much greater sense of community—opposite Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In stark contrast to the events that took place in New York City, not one instance of vandalism was recorded over the course of a week. When it started to rain, one passerby lowered the car’s hood to protect the motor. When Zimbardo eventually went to remove the car, three people called the police to report that an abandoned car was being stolen.
How does one create a sense of social responsibility? How do you stop people from thinking about only their own needs and concerns and encourage them to move toward seeing themselves as part of a larger community? The good news is that work conducted by Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, Stanford University psychologists, suggests that it doesn’t take much.
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In the first part of their study, a researcher posed as a volunteer worker. They went from door to door in a residential Californian neighborhood and asked people whether they would mind placing a sign in their gardens to help cut speeding in the area. There was just one small problem: It was a very big sign that would completely ruin the look of the person’s house and garden. To make the point as vividly as possible, the researcher showed residents a photograph of the large, poorly written sign, which said “DRIVE CAREFULLY,” on someone’s lawn. It completely dominated the surroundings, concealed much of the front of the house, and completely blocked the doorway. Not surprisingly, few residents took up the offer.