Mood and Helping Strangers: Revisiting Isen and Levin's Field Experiment

Helping others is an essential aspect of prosocial behavior. One much discussed factor influencing helping behavior is the mood of the helping person. In their foundational field experiment, Isen and Levin demonstrated that an elevated mood increases helpfulness toward strangers. Despite the numerous replications and related field experiments, only a few have investigated the obvious extension of negative mood on helping. Furthermore, the effect of the help seeker's gender has also rarely been considered. The aim of this study is to replicate the original experiment and to extend it by a negative mood condition and the effect of gender. Our field experiment involved 600 subjects. Mood was manipulated by either finding a coin (positive mood) or experiencing rudeness by a third party (negative mood). The positive mood treatment elicited more helping behavior (41.6 percent) compared to the control group (35 percent). Subjects in the negative mood treatment helped the least (23.9 percent). In the control group, both male and female help seekers received help to the same extent. However, the positive mood effect was observed only for female help seekers, while the negative mood effect was particularly strong for male help seekers.