Cross-Cultural Differences in Helping Strangers

Independent field experiments in 23 large cities around the world measured three types of spontaneous, nonemergency helping: alerting a pedestrian who dropped a pen, offering help to a pedestrian with a hurt leg trying to reach a pile of dropped magazines, and assisting a blind person cross the street. The results indicated that a city’s helping rate was relatively stable across the three measures, suggesting that helping of strangers is a cross-culturally meaningful characteristic of a place; large cross-cultural variation in helping emerged, ranging from an overall rate of 93% in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to 40% in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. Overall helping across cultures was inversely related to a country’s economic productivity; countries with the cultural tradition of simpatia were on average more helpful than countries with no such tradition. These findings constitute a rich body of descriptive data and novel hypotheses about the sociocultural, economic, and psychological determinants of helping behavior across cultures.