Levine Flashcards
Key Theme
Social study, “cross cultural differences and helping others”
Aim
- To see if the tendency of people within a city to offer non-emergency help to strangers was stable across different situations in which people need help.
- To see if helping strangers varies across cultures.
- To identify the characteristics of those communities in which strangers are more or less likely to be helped
Sampling method
Opportunity sampling
What were the 3 conditions?
Dropped pen, hurt leg, helping a blind person cross the street
Dropped Pen
424 people approached
Recorded as helping if they offered to help or if they called back to say it was dropped
Hurt leg
493 people
Limping and struggling to pick up magazines
Recorded as helping if offering help or giving help without offering.
Helping blind person
281 people
Crossing road
Recorded as helping if at minimum they said the light was green.
Study type
Correlation study
Type of experiment
Quasi
When did the experiments take place?
9-5 Monday- Friday, city centres, sunny days, 2nd person after the one chosen
Results
Most helpful- Brazil 93.33%
Least helpful- Malaysia 40.33%
Cities with more money were less helpful.
Small links between walking speed and helping.
Correlation results
Negative correlation between purchasing power and levels of help
Conclusions
Overall levels of helping across cultures are inversely related to a countries economic productivity.
Ethics
Maintained confidentiality
No harm caused
Ensured children/old people weren’t approached
Lacking in ethics:
Lack of consent
Ethnocentrism
Mostly ethnocentric because it was done in 23 cities
Reliability Internal
Internal-Replicable and standardised?
Was standardised because the confederates practised how to act.
May not be completely standardised because it was such a large amount of trials and cities
3 different behaviours meant they could ensure level of helping was consistent across different situations
Reliability internal
Will you get consistent results if you repeat it?
Yes, Large number of trials
Internal validity
Will it avoid extraneous variables?
Possible issue of participants seeing what researchers were doing and changing behaviour- demand characteristics.
External validity
Is the research generalisable?
Range of cultures so yes
Situations were realistic
