Levine

• Aims of the study

  • to see of the tendency of people within a city to offer non emergency help to strangers was stable across different situations in which people needed help
  • to see if helping strangers varies across cultures
  • to identify which characteristics of those communities in which strangers are more (or less) likely to be helped
• quasi experiment carried out in field environment
• Procedure carried out in two or more locations in city centre during office hours on summer days
• correlational analysis were also used to investigate the relationships between helping and various community variables
• total number peoples data recorded was 1198 from 23 large cities, the researchers who collected the data were psychologists who volunteered
• to minimise extraneous variables, all researchers were male and did not speak to participants, they were all college age and dressed neatly and casually, they were also trained in how to carry out the procedure
• helping behaviour measures in 3 non emergency scenarios

  • Dropped Pen - experimenters dropped a pen and appeared not to notice as they approached a participant.
  • Hurt Leg - Experimenters walked with a limp and leg brace dropped a pile of magazines and appeared to struggle to pick them up
  • Blind Person Crossing Road - Experimenters wearing dark glasses and with white canes stepped up to a crossing and held out their cane signalling they wanted help crossing the road.
• Scored as helping if they intervened in any way, rate of helping behaviour for each country was obtained by averaging the rate of helping on the three measures
• Community Variables assessed as follows

  • Population Size - Take from United Nations Demographics Yearbook
  • Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) - Measure of economic prosperity taken from statistics published by the world bank.
  • Cultural values - six independent cross cultural psychologists rated each country from 1 (very collectivist) to 10 (very individualistic)
  • Pace of Life - average walking speed
• There were significant differences between the likelihood of receiving non emergency help in the different cities. the city where help was most likely received - Brazil with a helping rate of 93% and help least likely received was Malaysia with helping rate of only 40%
• Countries with the value of simpatia - Brazil, Mexico, El salvador, Costa Rica and Spain - were significantly more helpful that others. The average helping rate for simpatia countries was 82% but for non simpatia it was was 65%.
• The only statistically significant value in community variables was the negative relationship between the measure of PPP and levels of overall helping. The more well off the residents of a city are, less likely they are to help.
• Evaluation of The Procedure

  strengths

  • High ecological validity, done in real life environment with scenarios that were plausible
  • Validity increased because participants were unaware so results should reflect genuine behaviour
  • Sample size was also very large, it is a genuine cross cultural study
  • Large amounts of quantitative data meant that levine could compare and perform statistical analysis to see if the data was significant
• Evaluation of the study

  Weaknesses

  • Because it uses primarily correlational analysis we are unable to establish cause and effect relationships.
  • Some members of public could've become suspicious and this could've affected their behaviour
  • No quantitative data
  • inevitably the replication and reliability will have beee relatively poor as not all participants will have had the same experience
  • The study violates ethical guidelines, the participants couldn't consent, they were deceived into thinking someone needed help and they weren't later debriefed and they also couldn't withdraw.