Levine et al

Levine et al

1. Participants

   • 23 countries
   • 1198 people
   • Selected as the second potential participant to cross a line
     • Children, disabled people and people carry heavy things were ignored

2. Procedure

   • Measures
     • Dropping a pen
       • Recorded as helping if they called back the confederate/ picked the pen up for him
     • Dropping a pile of magazines
       • Visible leg brace
       • Recorded as helping if they offered to pick them up or began to pick them up
     • Helping a blind man across the street
       • Waited at a crossing for someone to help him cross or tell him the light was green
   • Abandoned Measures
     • Asking for change
       • Shortage of small coins in some countries
     • Seeing if misplaced letters would be posted
       • People were scared to touch letters incase they were explosives
   • Confederates
     • All college aged men
     • Neatly dressed
     • Given the same scoring systems
     • No verbal communication with participants
     • Practised together
   • Community Variables
     • Population
     • Purchasing power parity
     • Collectivist/ Individualistic
     • Pace of life

3. Results

   • Consistancy in helping across all 3 measures
   • Helping behaviour varied across cultures
   • No gender difference in helping
   • Lower levels of purchasing power meant more helping behaviour
   • Simpatia countries were on average more helpful
   • Small relationship between pace of life and helping behaviour
     • Faster = less likely to help
   • Helping behaviour is related to economic productivity

4. DIsscussion

   • Simpata countries more helpfull
     • May be because of culture
     • May be because they are mainly Roman Catholic
   • Negative Correlation between PPP and helping
     • Lack of strong economy and traditional values means you help strangers

5. Evaluation

   • Validity
     • Higher levels of helping behaviour may have been due to traditional values not economic wealth
     • People may have noticed what was going on and changed their behaviour
     • Ecologically Valid
       • Plausable situations
       • Data collected in feild
       • Trained to act blind
   • Reliability
     • Highly standardised
     • Used 3 measures of helping
     • Large number of trials
       • May not have been exactly the same each trial
       • See a consistent trend
   • Ethics
     • Countries or people didn't give consent
     • Deceived as to the genuineness of the help
     • Could not withdraw
     • No debrief
     • Changed how they felt about themselves depending on whether they helped or not
     • Confidential
   • Data
     • Quantitative
       • Didn't get much understanding of motives behind behaviour
   • Sample
     • Vey large
   • Ethnocentrism
     • Mainly focusses on America, Europe and Asia
       • Misses some continents
     • Cities could be classed as 'world cities'
   • Research Method
     • Correlation
       • Cannot establish cause and effect
       • Could be another factor affecting the correlation
       • Can see a relationship

6. Links to key theme

   • Helping varies a lot around the world
   • Explains why such low levels of helping were found in Piliavin's study
     • Piliavin's study cannot be generalised
   • Suggests females help just as much as men

7. Links to debates

   • Individual/Situational
     • Culture has an effect on helping
     • Most help for the blind man so this situation means people help more
   • Psychology as a science
     • Replicable
       • Standardised
     • Could easily be proven wrong
       • Would be expensive

8. Links to area/perspective

   • Social area
     • Community variables created by society affected peoples helping behaviour

9. Aims

   • To see if the tendency to help is stable across different situations
   • To see if helping behaviour varies across cultures
   • To identify the characteristics of those countries that are more/less likely to help

10. Usefullness

    • Cannot choose where we need help so fairly useless
      • Help choose where to go on holiday