Conventional wisdom is that people living in big cities are less likely than smaller towns to help strangers in need, but new research suggests the likelihood of securing assistance is associated with socio-economic factors, and has little to do with the anonymity and the fast pace of urban living.
Researchers at University College London (UCL) measured whether people posted a lost letter, returned a dropped item, and stopped cars to let someone cross the road in 37 different neighbourhoods in 12 cities and 12 towns across the UK.
The lead author, Elena Zwirner, conducted the dropped item and road-crossing experiments in person, while letters addressed to her with a post-it saying: "Could you post this for me please? Thank you" were dropped on the pavement or left on car windscreens.
Overall, there were 1,367 instances where a member of the public had the opportunity to help the experimenter – and in 643 (47 per cent) of occasions, help was given. Data showed that 485/879 (55.1 per cent) letters were returned, 130/398 (32.7 per cent) people helped the experimenter to pick up some dropped items and 28/90 (31.1 per cent) cars stopped.
The main variable influencing whether help was offered was neighbourhood wealth, not population density, the researchers found.
Unlike many previous studies, the work investigated behaviour in the real world, rather than via online surveys or experimental games.
Study author Nichola Raihani, professor of evolution and behaviour at UCL, said that the folk wisdom that people are friendlier in small towns is to some extent supported by older studies, which tended to compare one central neighbourhood in a city to a rural town.
But her approach, which measured helping behaviours in wealthy neighbourhoods and in more deprived neighbourhoods, found something different.
"Most of the variation in whether help was offered was explained by neighbourhood wealth, with help being more forthcoming in higher-wealth neighbourhoods," the authors wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Raihani cautioned that it was still unclear whether it was the deprivation people experienced that affected their likelihood to help a stranger in need, or whether it was the context of being in that deprived environment that changed their willingness to help.
One aspect the study did not investigate — as the experiment was largely conducted in person by Zwirner, who is a white woman — was the potential role of sex, ethnicity and accent in soliciting assistance from strangers.
Raihani emphasised that the study’s findings did not indicate that people who lived in poor neighbourhoods were not helpful.
Existing literature suggests that when people lack material security, things like food and shelter, they tend to invest in small, tight social networks — and helping and cooperation is very high within those networks, but not necessarily outside of them, she said.
“Because helping another person is inherently … a risk, you pay a cost to help someone and you might or might not get a return on investment” she said.
“So if we want these impartial norms of [so-called] prosociality to be high in the sense that strangers are always helped, and people always help those who are in need — the best way to achieve that in some ways might be to increase people’s standard of living.” – Guardian