Measuring Behaviors Across Cultures By Levine

In Measuring Behaviors Across Cultures, Levine discusses what it means to be helpful and how helpfulness can be measured. Levine was inspired to conduct this experiment after comparing how people in New York City helped others versus those who lived in Myanmar. He noted how much more helpful and kind the people of Myanmar were than New Yorkers, so although it was never explicitly stated, it would seem that his hypothesis was that people that resided in rural areas would be more helpful than those who lived in urban areas. When he decided to do this experiment, he had to create a series of tasks and figure out a scoring system. The scoring system would assist in converting these acts of kindness into a way that could be studied. In the end, …show more content…
Although there would still be cultural differences that might cause problems in the experiment, such as before, if they know what is happening, most people might feel compelled to help. This is different from the previous situations he used because while one might not feel compelled to help someone who dropped their pen, they would hopefully feel the need to help someone who’s life was at stake. The cultural issues that might occur for drowning might be that citizens of a certain country might not know how to swim, so they will not know how to help them if they were drowning. In the case of choking, people might not know the heimlich maneuver, or they might not understand that they person is choking. In these cases, it is possible for another life threatening situation to be used in order to gather data accurately. Another way of measuring helpfulness is to look at whether the person that is representing the independent variable is male or female. In the situation of the drop pen, they used a well dressed male. What if it was a female? It is often said that females receive help more often simply because of their gender. I think that notion could be put to the test in an experiment like this. It might also be interesting to see if males in particular are more likely to help if they see that the person needing assistance is female rather than male. Doing this …show more content…
In New York, for example, you might come across less helpers because they are rushing to work and cannot be bothered. However, you might experience nicer pedestrians outside of rush hour, maybe early in the morning or around noon. Doing each situation at different points throughout the day could also show people’s limit to their helpfulness at any given time. If it is during rush hour, someone might not be willing to help a blind man or woman across the street, however, they might be okay with picking up a magazine and handing it to someone as that situation is much faster. Doing this would also expose rush hour times in other countries, so we could learn more about how our culture differs from theirs. Making time a serious factor in this experiment, from rush hour times to even different seasons, time is an important detail when it comes to observing people’s