Around the world, research reveals, people help each other about every 2 minutes
University of California - Los Angeles
The research, which examined behaviors in
towns and rural areas in several different countries, revealed that people
comply with these small requests for help far more often than they decline
them. The findings suggest that people from all cultures have more similar
cooperative behaviors than prior research has established.
A
new study by UCLA sociologist Giovanni Rossi and an international team of
collaborators finds that people rely on each other for help constantly.
In
the study, published in Scientific
Reports, the authors -- who also included researchers at universities in
Australia, Ecuador, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. -- explore the human
capacity for cooperation. They found that people signal a need for assistance,
such as asking someone to pass them a utensil, once every couple of minutes.
And
the research revealed that those requests for help do not go unanswered: Across
cultures, people comply with these small requests far more often than they
decline them. On the rare occasions when people do decline, they explain why.
Those human tendencies -- to help others when needed and to explain when such help can't be given -- transcends cultural differences, suggesting that, deep down, people from all cultures have more similar cooperative behaviors than prior research has established.
The
new findings help solve a puzzle generated by prior anthropological and
economic research, which has emphasized variation in rules and norms governing
cooperation.
For example, while whale hunters of Lamalera, Indonesia, follow
established rules about how to share out a large catch, Hadza foragers of
Tanzania share their food more out of a fear of generating negative gossip. In
Kenya, wealthier Orma villagers are expected to pay for public goods such as
road projects. Wealthy Gnau villagers of Papua New Guinea, on the other hand,
would reject such an offer because it creates an awkward obligation to
reciprocate for their poorer neighbors.
"Cultural
differences like these have created a puzzle for understanding cooperation and
helping among humans," said Rossi, the paper's first author. "Are our
decisions about sharing and helping shaped by the culture we grew up with? Or
are humans generous and giving by nature?"
To
answer those questions, the authors analyzed over 40 hours of video recordings
of everyday life involving more than 350 people in geographically,
linguistically and culturally diverse sites -- towns in England, Italy, Poland
and Russia, and rural villages in Ecuador, Ghana, Laos and Aboriginal
Australia.
The
analysis focused on sequences in which one person sent a signal for help, such
as asking directly or visibly struggling with a task, and another person
responded. The authors identified more than 1,000 such requests, occurring on
average about once every two minutes. The situations involved
"low-cost" decisions about sharing items for everyday use or
assisting others with tasks around the house or village, for example.
Such
decisions are many orders more frequent than "high-cost" decisions
such as sharing the spoils of a successful whale hunt or contributing to the
construction of a village road, the types of decisions that have been found to
be significantly influenced by culture.
People complied with small requests seven times more often than
they declined, and six times more often than they ignored them. People did
sometimes reject or ignore small requests, but a lot less frequently than they
complied. The average rates of rejection (10%) and ignoring (11%) were much
lower than the average rate of compliance (79%).
The
preference for compliance held across all cultures and was unaffected by
whether the interaction was among family or non-family members.
People
helped without explanation, but when they declined, 74% of the time they gave
an explicit reason. That suggests that while people decline helping only for a
good reason, they give help unconditionally, without needing to explain why
they are doing it.
"A
cross-cultural preference for compliance with small requests is not predicted
by prior research on resource-sharing and cooperation, which instead suggest
that culture should cause prosocial behavior to vary in appreciable ways due to
local norms, values, and adaptations to the natural, technological, and
socio-economic environment," said N. J. Enfield, the paper's corresponding
author and a linguist at the University of Sydney. "These and other
factors could in principle make it easier for people to say 'no' to small
requests, but this is not what we find."
The
findings suggest that being helpful is an ingrained reflex in the human
species, Rossi said.
"While cultural variation comes into play for special occasions and high-cost exchange, when we zoom in on the micro level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species' tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible," he said.
