Helping in 36 U.S. cities.

A series of experiments examined the relationship of urbanism to helping. Six types of hclping behaviors were studied in a cross-sample of 36 small. medium. and large cities across the United States. The relationship of helping to a series of statistics reflecting the demographic. social. environ-mental. and economic characteristics of these communities was then examined. The strongest and most consistent predictor of overall helping was population density. There were significant corre-lations between economic indicators and helping in three situations. Helping in some situations also tended to be negatively related to violent crime rates and to environmental problems. Thomas Wolfe (1940) wrote that city people “have no man-ners, no courtesy, no consideration for the rights of others, and no humanity. ” Several studies offer evidence that this urban ste-reotype is widely shared in the United States. Krupat and Guild (1980), for example, reported that a sample of university stu-dents perceived cities as anonymous, impersonal, and unsafe and the “typical urbanite ” as untrusting and uninvolved with others. Schneider and Mockus (1974) reported that 79 % of a sample of university students believed that help from a stranger was more likely to be received in a small town than in a large city. Many urban theorists have offered similarly unflattering de-scriptions of the “urban personality. ” Theorists ranging from