kindness of strangers.pdf

8/22/2019 kindness of strangers.pdf

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Ill never forget a lesson that I learnedas a boy growing up in New YorkCity. One day, when I was perhaps sixyears old, I was walking with my fatheron a crowded midtown street. All of asudden, the normal flow of pedestrian

traffic backed up as people tried toavoid a large object on the sidewalk. Tomy astonishment, the object turned outto be a human being, a man lying un-conscious against a building. Not one ofthe passing herd seemed to notice thatthe obstacle was a man. Certainly noone made eye contact. As we shuffled

by, my fatherthe model of a loving,caring gentlemanpointed to a bottlein a paper bag and told me that the poorsoul on the sidewalk just needed tosleep it off. When the drunken man be-gan to ramble senselessly, my father

warned me not to go near, saying Younever know how hell react. I sooncame to see that days lesson as a primerfor urban adaptation.

Yet many years later I had a very dif-ferent experience while visiting a mar-ket in Rangoon. I had spent the previ-ous 12 months traveling in poor Asiancities, but even by those standards thiswas a scene of misery. In addition to

being dreadfully poor, the residentshad to contend with the sweltering cli-mate, ridiculously dense crowds and a

stiff wind blowing dust everywhere.Suddenly a man carrying a huge bag ofpeanuts called out in pain and fell tothe ground. I then witnessed an aston-ishing piece of choreography. Appear-ing to have rehearsed their motions

many times, a half dozen sellers ranfrom their stalls to help, leaving unat-tended what may have been the totali-ty of their possessions. One put a blan-ket under the mans head; anotheropened his shirt; a third questionedhim carefully about the pain; a fourthfetched water; a fifth kept onlookersfrom crowding around too closely; asixth ran for help. Within minutes, adoctor arrived, and two other locals

joined in to assist. The performancecould have passed for a final exam atparamedic school.

The Good, the Bad and the UglyRousseau wrote that cities are the sinkof the human race. But as my experi-ences in New York and Rangoon makeclear, not all cities are the same. Places,like individuals, have their own person-alities. Which environments most fosteraltruism? In which cities is a person inneed likely to receive help? I have spentmost of the past 15 years systematicallyexploring these questions.

My students and I have traveledacross the United States and much of

the world to observe where passersbyare most likely to aid a stranger. Ineach of the cities we surveyed, we con-ducted five different field experiments.Our studies focused on simple actsof assistance, as opposed to OskarSchindlerlike heroism: Is an inadver-tently dropped pen retrieved by a pass-ing pedestrian? Does a man with an in-

jured leg receive assistance picking upa fallen magazine? Will a blind person

be helped across a busy intersection?

Will someone try to make change for aquarter (or its foreign equivalent)when asked? Do people take the timeto mail a stamped and addressed letterthat has apparently been lost?

Our first studies were done in the

early 1990s, when my students and Ivisited 36 cities of various sizes in dif-ferent regions of the United States. Theresults did nothing to dispel my child-hood impressions of New York. In anassessment that combined the resultsof these five experiments, New Yorkcame out dead last36th out of 36.When we included a sixth measure ofkindness toward strangers (per capitacontribution to United Way), NewYork only moved up to 35th on the list.Overall, we found that people in smalland medium-sized cities in the South-

east were the most helpful and that res-idents of large Northeastern and WestCoast cities were the least.

One of the advantages of testing somany places is that we could see howother social, economic and environ-mental indicators correlated with ourexperimental results. Far and away the

best predictor, we found, was popula-tion density. This parameter was moreclosely tied to the helpfulness of a citythan were the crime rate, the pace of

226 American Scientist, Volume 91

The Kindness of Strangers

Peoples willingness to help someone during a chance encounter

on a city street varies considerably around the world

Robert V. Levine

Figure 1. Illustration from a Victorian-era chil-

drens Bible depicts the famous story Jesus is

said to tell in Luke 10:2537: A man is attackedby thieves and left injured by the roadside;

the only one to come to his aid is a passing

Samaritan, a member of a group despised byJews of that era. This parable about the will-

ingness of one stranger to help another is es-

pecially relevant in modern times, because somany people live in cities and are surrounded

daily by people they do not know. How likely

is one to encounter a good Samaritan today?

The author and his students probed that ques-tion and found that the answer varies consid-

erably from place to place.

Robert V. Levine received his doctorate from NewYork University in 1974. Except for brief visitingappointments in Brazil, Japan and Sweden, he hasspent the past three decades working at CaliforniaState University in Fresno, where he teaches anddoes research in the Department of Psychology. Inaddition to numerous scholarly articles, Levine hasauthored two popular books, the most recent beingThe Power of Persuasion: How Were Boughtand Sold (John Wiley & Sons). Address: Depart-ment of Psychology, 5310 N. Campus Drive, M/SPH11, California State University, Fresno, CA93740-8019. Internet: [email protected]


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2003 MayJune 227www.americanscientist.org


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life, the prevailing economic conditionsor environmental stressorssay, noiseor air pollution. We could readily makea case that, overall, people in morecrowded cities were much less likely totake the time to help. New York wasExhibit A.

This finding is, of course, easy enoughto understand. Crowding brings out the

worst in us. Urban critics have demon-strated that squeezing too many peopleinto too small a space leads, paradoxi-cally enough, to alienation, anonymityand social isolation. Ultimately, peoplefeel less responsible for their behaviortoward othersespecially strangers.Previous research had shown that citydwellers are more likely to do one an-other harm. Our study indicated thatthey are also less likely to do one anoth-er good and that this apathy increaseswith the degree of crowding.

But do all big cities exhibit this pat-

tern? It was no surprise to find thatdensely packed cities like New York donot measure up to the communitarianstandards of their smaller and calmercounterparts in the Southeast and Mid-west. But as my experience in Rangoonshowed, one comes across pockets ofvillage cohesiveness in the most urbanplaces. How do big-city dwellers fromvarious countries compare? In particu-lar, how does New York measure up toother large cities worldwide?

To answer these questions, for sixsummers Ara Norenzayan and morethan 20 other adventurous studentsfrom my university worked with me tocarry out five separate experiments inlarge cities around the world. In all, weran nearly 300 trials of helpfulness thatinvolved feigning blindness, droppedmore than 400 pens, approached some

500 people while pretending to have ahurt leg or to be in need of change, andstrategically lost almost 800 letters. Torelate our findings to the situation in theUnited States, we used results for thesame five experiments carried out inNew York during our earlier study.

Problems in TranslationPsychologists who mount elaboratefield studies are keenly aware that ob-serving what doesnt work in experi-ments is sometimes as instructive as ob-serving what does. True to this rule, our

first noteworthy finding was that waysof measuring helping do not alwaystranslate cleanly across cultures. Twoexperiments in particularthose thatinvolved asking for change and losingletterssimply do not have the samefunctional meaning in many countriesthat they have in the United States.

The lost-letter test was the mosttroublesome. This experiment entailsleaving stamped, addressed envelopesin a visible location on the street and

then recording the percentage of theseletters that get delivered. One problemwe encountered was that people liter-ally ran away from the letters in somecities. In Tel Aviv, in particular, whereunclaimed packages have all too oftenturned out to contain bombs, peopleactively avoided our suspicious-look-ing envelopes. In El Salvador, our ex-

perimenter was informed about a pop-ular scam in which shysters wereintentionally dropping letters: When agood Samaritan picked one up, a conman appeared, announcing that he hadlost the letter and that it contained cash(it didnt), then demanding the money

back with enough insistence to intimi-date the mild-mannered. Not surpris-ingly, very few letters were touched inEl Salvador.

In many developing countries, wefound that local mailboxes are eitherunattended or nonexistent. As a result,

mailing a letter in these places requireswalking to a central post office, ratherthan simply going to the letter box onthe nearest corner. In Tirane, Albania(where we eventually gave up our at-tempts to gather data), we werewarned not to bother with this experi-ment, because even if a letter wereposted, it probably wouldnt arrive atits destination. (Of course, postal unre-liability is also a factor in some moreaffluent nations.) And most problem-


Kolkata

Bangkok

Kuala Lumpur

New York

Mexico City

San SalvadorSan Jose

Rio de Janeiro

Nairobi

Lilongwe

Tel Aviv

Singapore

Jakarta

Hong Kong

Taipei

TokyoShanghai

Kiev

StockholmCopenhagen

Amsterdam

Madrid Rome SofiaBucharest

Budapest

Prague

Vienna

included in international study

included in United States study

data gathering abandoned

Buenos Aires

Tirane

Figure 2. Tests of helpfulness span the globe. The authors 1994 study of helping was limited to 36 U.S. cities (yellow), but his more recent work

includes 23 cities (red), 22 of them located in other countries. In a few places, attempts to gather information about helpfulness of strangers had

to be abandoned (blue).


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atic of all, in several countries wefound that letters and postal commu-nication are irrelevant to many resi-dents lives. In retrospect, we shouldhave known better and been less eth-nocentric when we designed the ex-periment. After all, what can one ex-pect in India, for example, where theilliteracy rate is 52 percent?

The asking-for-change experimentalso encountered a variety of problemsin translation. In this study, the experi-

menter would ask someone walking inthe opposite direction for change for aquarter (in the United States) or theequivalent in other currencies. Betweenmonetary inflation and the widespreaduse of prepaid telephone cards, how-ever, we learned that the need for par-ticular coins has disappeared in manyparts of the world. In Tel Aviv, for ex-ample, no one seemed to understandwhy a person might require smallchange. In Calcutta (a city that has nowofficially changed its name to Kolkata),our experimenter had difficulty find-

ing anyone who had small-value billsand coinsreflecting a general short-age all over India at that time. InBuenos Aires, capital of the strugglingArgentine economy, we wonderedhow to score the response of a personwho replied that he was so broke thathe couldnt even make change. In afew cities, people were afraid to ex-change any money with strangers. InKiev (another city for which we even-tually gave up collecting data), where

thieves run rampant, visitors arewarned never to open a purse or walleton the street.

In the end, we limited our cross-national comparisons to the tests inwhich the experimenter pretended to

be blind, to have an injured leg or toaccidentally drop a pen. Even these sit-uations, we found, occasionally suf-fered in translation. In the hurt-leg tri-als, for example, we learned that amere leg brace was sometimes insuffi-

cient to warrant sympathy. Take Jakar-ta, where experimenter WidyakaNusapati reported that people dontusually bother to help someone with aminor leg injury. Perhaps if the limbwere missing, Nusapati observed, thetest might be valid there.

We found that in some cities, such asTokyo and in parts of the United States,traffic light controls give off distinctivesounds so that the visually impairedwill know when it is safe to walk, mak-ing it less likely that people would con-sider a blind person crossing an inter-

section as someone in need of aid. And,in a curious twist, the experimenter inTokyo felt so compelled by the sur-rounding norms of civility that hefound it nearly impossible to fake blind-ness or a hurt leg to attract well-meaninghelpers. As a result, Tokyo could not beincluded in our final ranking.

Despite these difficulties, we ran thethree tests successfully in 23 differentcountriesthe largest cross-nationalcomparison of helping ever conducted.

What we found suggests a world ofdifference in the willingness of urban-ites to reach out to strangers. In the

blind-person experiment, for example,subjects in five citiesRio de Janeiro,San Jose (Costa Rica, not California),Lilongwe, Madrid and Praguehelped the pedestrian across the streeton every occasion, whereas in KualaLumpur and Bangkok help was of-fered less than half the time. If youhave a hurt leg in downtown San Jose,

Kolkata or Shanghai, our results showthat you are more than three timesmore likely to receive help picking up afallen magazine than if you are strug-gling on the streets of New York orSofia. And if you drop your pen be-hind you in New York, you have lessthan one-third the chance that you doin Rio of ever seeing it again.

The two highest-ranking cities are inLatin America: Rio and San Jose. Over-all, we found that people in Por-tuguese- and Spanish-speaking citiestended to be among the most helpful:

The other three such cities on our list,Madrid, San Salvador and Mexico City,each scored well above average. Con-sidering that some of these places sufferfrom long-term political instability, highcrime rates and a potpourri of other so-cial, economic and environmental ills,these positive results are noteworthy.

Social psychologist Aroldo Ro-drigues, who is currently a colleagueof mine at California State University,Fresno, spent most of his career as a


Figure 3. Three measures of helpfulness were found to translate reasonably well between cultures. For one test, the experimenter would drop

a pen, apparently by accident and seemingly without noticing, at a moment when a stranger approaching on the sidewalk would see it fall (left).

If this person pointed out the dropped pen to the experimenter, a positive result was entered in the tally, which gauged the helpfulness of 424

people in all. In a second set of tests, the experimenter donned a leg brace and walked with a limp. When a passerby approached within 20 feet,the experimenter would drop several magazines on the sidewalk, seemingly by accident, and then struggle to pick them up (middle). If the pass-

ing stranger helped gather up the magazines or even offered to help, the trial was scored positively. A total of 493 people were tested in this way.

For a third test, the experimenter would feign blindness and approach the curb at a busy intersection just as the traffic light facing him turnedgreen. He would then wait on the sidewalk for a passerby to offer aid (right). If one did so while the light was still green, the experiment would

be scored positively; if not, it would be scored negatively. The author and his students completed a total of 281 trials of this nature.


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leading scholar at universities in themost helpful city of all, Rio. Rodrigueswas not surprised by our results.There is an important word in Brazil:simptico, Rodrigues explains. Theterm has no equivalent in English. Itrefers to a range of desirable socialqualitiesto be friendly, nice, agree-able and good-natured, a person who

is fun to be with and pleasant to dealwith. Mind you, simptico doesntmean that a person is necessarily hon-est or moral. It is a social quality.Brazilians, especially the Cariocas ofRio, want very much to be seen as sim-

ptico. And going out of ones way toassist strangers is part of this image.This Brazilian social script also extendsto the Hispanic cultures in our study,where a simptico personality is held inequally high regard.

There were other notable trends, al-though each had its exceptions. Help-

ing rates tended to be high in countrieswith low economic productivity (lowgross domestic product per capitathat is, less purchasing power for eachcitizen), in cities with a slow pace oflife (as measured by pedestrian walk-ing speeds) and in cultures that em-phasize the value of social harmony.This city personality is consistentwith the simptico hypothesis. Peoplein communities where social obliga-tions take priority over individualachievement tend to be less economi-cally productive, but they show more

willingness to assist others. This trenddid not, however, hold for all of thecities in our study. Pedestrians in thefast-paced, first-world cities of Copen-hagen and Vienna, for example, werevery kind to strangers, whereas theircounterparts in slower-paced KualaLumpur were not helpful at all. Theseexceptions make clear that even citydwellers with a fast pace of life and afocus on economic achievement are ca-pable of finding time for strangers inneed and that a slow pace of life is noguarantee that people will invest their

leisure time in practicing social ideals.

Start Spreading the NewsNew York may not have ranked lowestin our global study, as it had in our ear-lier tests of helpful acts in various U.S.cities, but it came close. Overall, NewYorkers placed 22nd in our list of 23.They ranked 22nd on tests of whetherpeople would retrieve a dropped penand of whether they would assistsomeone with a hurt leg. They came


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Rochester, New York

Houston, Texas

Nashville, Tennessee

Memphis, Tennessee

Knoxville, Tennessee

Louisville, Kentucky

St. Louis, Missouri

Detroit, Michigan

East Lansing, Michigan

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Indianapolis, Indiana

Columbus, Ohio

Canton, Ohio

Kansas City, Missouri

Worcester, Massachusetts

Santa Barbara, California

Dallas, Texas

San Jose, California

San Diego, California

Springfield, Massachusetts

Atlanta, Georgia

Bakersfield, California

Buffalo, New York

San Francisco, California

Youngstown, Ohio

Sacramento, California

Salt Lake City, Utah

Boston, Massachusetts

Providence, Rhode Island

Chicago, Illinois

Shreveport, Louisiana

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Fresno, California

Los Angeles, California

New York, New York

Paterson, New Jersey

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city percent who helped

10020 6040 80

pen hurt blind

Figure 4. Authors 1994 study measured the general level of helpfulness in 36 U.S. cities. The

published ranking was based on five experiments of helpfulness and on per-capita contribu-

tion to United Way, a popular charity campaign. (The final ranking differs somewhat when

giving to United Way is not factored in. In that case, New York moves to the very bottom of thelist.) The authors attempts to extend the same analysis to foreign cities proved problematic, be-

cause some of the experiments did not translate well to other cultures. Only three of the ex-

perimental yardsticks proved readily applicable in most places: willingness to help someonewho had dropped a pen (red), willingness to help someone with an injured leg (green)and will-

ingness to help a blind person (blue).


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out a little below the average (13th)when it came to helping a blind per-son to cross the street.

We also learned that there may be adifference between helping and civili-ty. In places where people walked fast,they were less likely to be civil evenwhen they did offer assistance. In NewYork, helping gestures often had aparticularly hard edge. During the

dropped-pen experiment, for example,helpful New Yorkers would typicallycall to the experimenter that he haddropped his pen, then quickly move onin the opposite direction. In contrast,helpers in laid-back Riowhere aleisurely gait and simptico personalityare ways of lifewere more likely toreturn the pen personally, sometimesrunning to catch up with the experi-menter. In the blind-person trials, help-ful New Yorkers would often wait untilthe light turned green, tersely an-nounce that it was safe to cross and

then quickly walk ahead. In the friend-lier cities, helpers were more likely tooffer to walk the experimenter acrossthe street, and they sometimes asked ifhe then needed further assistance. In-deed, one of our experimenters prob-lems in these place was how to sepa-rate from particularly caring strangers.

In general, it seemed as though NewYorkers are willing to offer help onlywhen they could do so with the assur-ance of no further contact, as if to sayIll meet my social obligation but,make no mistake, this is as far as we go

together. How much of this attitude ismotivated by fear and how much bysimply not wanting to waste time ishard to know. But in more helpful cities,like Rio, it often seemed to us that hu-man contact is the very motive for help-ing. People were more likely to give aidwith a smile and to welcome the thankyou our experimenter returned.

Perhaps the most dramatic exampleof uncivil helping involved one of thetests we attempted and then aban-doned, the lost-letter experiment. Inmany cities, I received envelopes that

had clearly been opened. In almost allof these cases, the finder had then re-sealed it or mailed it in a new envelope.Sometimes they attached notes, usuallyapologizing for opening our letter. Onlyfrom New York did I receive an enve-lope which had its entire side rippedand left open. On the back of the letterthe helper had scribbled, in Spanish:Hijo de puta ir[r]esposablewhich Idiscovered when it was translated forme, makes a very nasty accusation

about my mother. Below that wasadded a straightforward English-lan-guage expletive, which I could readilyunderstand. It is interesting to picturethis angry New Yorker, perhaps curs-ing my irresponsibility all the while hewas walking to the mailbox, yet forsome reason feeling compelled to takethe time to perform his social duty for astranger he already hated. Ironically,

this rudely returned letter counted inthe helping column in scoring NewYork. A most antiptico test subject, asthe Brazilians would say.

Compare this response to those inTokyo, where several finders hand-delivered the letters to their ad-dressees. Or, consider a note I re-ceived on the back of a returned letterfrom the most helpful city in our ear-lier study of U.S. cities, Rochester,New York:

Hi. I found this on my windshieldwhere someone put it with a notesaying they found it next to mycar. I thought it was a parkingticket. Im putting this in the mail-

box 11/19. Tell whoever sent thisto you it was found on the bridgenear/across from the library andSouth Ave. Garage about 5 p.m.on 11/18.

P. S. Are you related to anyLevines in New Jersey or Long Is-land? L. L.

A Special Attitude?Do our results mean that New Yorkersare less kind peopleless caring on theinsidethan city dwellers in morehelpful places? Not at all. The NewYorkers to whom we spoke gave manygood reasons for their reluctance to


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Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

San Jose, Costa Rica

Lilongwe, Malawi

Kolkata, India

Vienna, Austria

Madrid, Spain

Copenhagen, Denmark

Shanghai, China

Mexico City, Mexico

Prague, Czech Republic

San Salvador, El Salvador

Stockholm, Sweden

Budapest, Hungary

Bucharest, Romania

Tel Aviv, Israel

Rome. Italy

Bangkok, Thailand

Taipei, Taiwan

Sofia, Bulgaria

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Singapore, Singapore

New York, United States

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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pen hurt blind

Figure 5. Ranking of cities around the world (by the same three measures shown in Figure 4)

places Rio first and Kuala Lumpur last. It is, however, unlikely that these results reflect any realvariation in human nature from country to country. Rather, the author posits, people are more orless likely to offer help to a stranger depending on the place they happen to be in at that moment.


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help strangers. Most, like me, had beentaught early on that reaching out topeople you dont know can be danger-ous. To survive in New York, we were

told, you should avoid even the vague-ly suspicious.Some also expressed concern that

others might not want unsolicited help,that the stranger, too, might be afraidof outside contact or might feel patron-ized or insulted. Many told stories of

being outright abused for trying tohelp. One woman described an en-counter with a frail, elderly man with ared-tipped cane who appeared unableto manage crossing an intersection.

When she gently offered assistance, hebarked back, When I want help Illask for it. Mind your own f-ing busi-ness. Others told of being burned

once too often by hustlers. One non-helper commented that most NewYorkers have seen blindness faked,lameness faked, been at least verballyaccosted by mentally ill or aggressivehomeless people. This does not neces-sarily make one immune or callous,

but rather, wary.Over and again, New Yorkers told

us they cared deeply about the needsof strangers, but that the realities of cityliving prohibited their reaching out.

People spoke with nostalgia for thepast, when they would routinely pickup hitchhikers or arrange a meal for ahungry stranger. Many expressed frus-

trationeven angerthat life todaydeprived them of the satisfaction offeeling like good Samaritans.

These explanations may simply bethe rationalizations of uncharitable cit-izens trying to preserve their self-im-age. But I do not think this is the case.The bulk of the evidence indicates thathelping tends to be less dependent onthe nature of the local people than it ison the characteristics of the local envi-ronment. And investigators havedemonstrated that seemingly minorchanges in situation can drastically af-

fect helpingabove and beyond thepersonalities or moral beliefs of thepeople involved. It is noteworthy thatstudies show the location where onewas raised has less to do with helpingthan the place one currently lives. Inother words, Brazilians and New York-ers are both more likely to offer help inIpanema than they are in Manhattan.

Yet the cause of civility in cities likeNew York and Kuala Lumpur may not

be hopeless. Just as characteristics ofthe situation may operate against help-ing, there are ways to modify the envi-

ronment so as to encourage it. Experi-ments have shown, for example, thatreversing the anonymity and diffusionof responsibility that characterize life insome citiesby increasing personal ac-countability, or simply by getting peo-ple to address one another by name

boosts helping. In a 1975 experiment ata New York beach, Thomas Moriarity,then a social psychologist at New YorkUniversity, found that only 20 percentof people intervened when a man (ac-


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population density(people per square mile)

population size(millions)

violent crime rate(incidents per 100 inhabitants per year)

Los Angeles

New YorkNew YorkLos Angeles New York

Los Angeles

helpfulness

index

0 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 0 2 4 6 8 10 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5

Figure 6. What accounts for the variation in helpfulness? The authors 1994 study of U.S. cities suggests that the key parameter may be popu-lation density: Cities having more than about 1,500 people per square mile tend to show comparatively low levels of helpfulness (left). Two of

those unfriendly cities, New York and Los Angeles, are also especially large (middle)and have high rates of violent crime (right), factors that

might also contribute to the lack of helpfulness one finds on the street. The other cities tested show no obvious correlation between size or crimerate and the prevailing level of helpfulness.

100

80

60

40

0 10,000 20,000 30,000

average

helping

rate

(percent)

per capita Gross Domestic Product (dollars)

Malawi

India

China Mexico

El SalvadorHungary

Romania

Thailand

Bulgaria

Malaysia

Singapore

BrazilCosta Rica

SpainAustria

Denmark

Sweden

Israel

Italy

Netherlands

U.S.A.

Czech Republic

Figure 7. Economic productivity appears to have some influence on the degree of helpfulness one

can expect. People generally show the highest level of helpfulness in places with low economicproductivity (gauged here by the per-capita Gross National Product after a correction to com-

pensate for relative purchasing power in different countries). Similarly, those in places with

high economic productivity typically rank low in measures of helpfulness. The helpfulness val-

ues plotted represent the results for one major city in each of these countries.


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tually one of the experimenters) bla-tantly stole a portable radio off of thetemporarily abandoned blanket next tothem. But when the owner of the radiosimply asked her neighbors to keep aneye on the radio while she was gone,95 percent of those who agreed steppedin to stop the snatcher.

Inducing a bit of guiltby making

people aware that they could be doingmorealso seems to make a differ-ence. Perhaps most promising is theobservation that helping can be effec-tively taught. Psychologists havefound, for example, that children whoare exposed to altruistic characters ontelevision tend to mimic them. And,

because prosocial exemplars in real lifeoften induce others to follow suit, anyincreases in helping are potentiallyself-perpetuating.

Might a kinder environment even-tually raise the level of helpfulness in

New York? This city is leading a na-tionwide trend and currently enjoyinga wave of crime reduction. (Statisticsindicate that fewer New Yorkers aredoing each other injury today than inthe recent past.) Could diminishedworries over street crime free morepeople to step forth and offer one an-other aid, strangers included? Our ex-periments do not address variationsover time, but I suspect that little willchange. After all, the reduction in thenumber of harm-doers does not nec-essarily imply that there will be

greater quantity of altruism practiced.And there is little doubt that thedrunk man I watched people sidestepwhen I was six would be even lesslikely to receive help from a passingstranger today.

A little more than a century ago, au-thor John Habberton may have hadNew Yorkers in mind when he wrotethat nowhere in the world are theremore charitable hearts with plenty ofmoney behind them than in largecities, yet nowhere else is there moresuffering. Perhaps good Samaritans

are indeed living in New York in largenumbers but are hiding behind protec-tive screens. To strangers in need ofhelp, it would make little difference,thoughts being less important than ac-tions. The bottom line: Ones prospectsfor being helped by a stranger are

bleaker in New York than they are inRio, Mexico City or Shanghai. Indeed,youre more likely to receive assistancefrom someone you dont know justabout anywhere else in world.

BibliographyClark, M. S. (ed.) 1991. Prosocial Behavior. New-

bury Park, Calif.: Sage.

Levine, R. V. 1990. The pace of life. AmericanScientist 78:450459.

Levine, R. 1997. A Geography of Time. NewYork: BasicBooks.

Levine, R. V., T. S. Martinez, G. Brase and K.Sorenson. 1994. Helping in 36 U.S. Cities.Jour-

nal of Personality and Social Psychology67:6982.Levine, R. V., and A. Norenzayan. 1999. The

pace of life in 31 countries.Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology 30:178205.

Levine, R. V., A. Norenzayan and K. Philbrick.2001. Cross-cultural differences in helpingstrangers.Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology32:543560.

Milgram, S. 1970. The experience of living incities. Science 167:14611468.

Moriarity, T. 1975. Crime, commitment, and theresponsive bystander: Two field experi-ments.Journal of Personality and Social Psy-chology 31:370376.


Figure 8. New Yorkers earned a reputation for callousness in 1964 when Catherine (Kitty)

Genovese was killed on this street in Kew Gardens, Queens, while making her way home

from her job. Dozens of people in the surrounding buildings heard her screams as she was re-

peatedly attacked over an interval of 32 minutes, but none came to her aid and she died of stabwounds. This tragic episode inspired much self-analysis among the citys residents. The au-

thors interviews of New Yorkers who proved unwilling to help in simple experiments suggestsome of the factors that prevent well-meaning people from aiding strangers. (Photograph

courtesy of Joseph De May, Jr.).

Links to Internet resources for further

exploration of The Kindness of

Strangers are available on theAmerican

Scientist Web site:

www.americanscientist.org

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