Re:The Vole's Hox and I: Exploratory Systems (or,

Engaging story. Interesting about saving the voles and not the human kids.

The kind of appeals we use to swap resources are traded on symbols of pathos and authority. The "Third Person" technique in propaganda theory is probably the primary way we learn what to trust in larger culture, even though it is almost entirely unreliable, seemingly being based on the assumption that the people around us providing cues share our fate and priorities. A struggling vole is a "First Person" contact, a legitimate appeal for help with no industry PR firm behind it. We can remember to trust it, while learning to mistrust the indirect sources.

A recent article: The Kindness of Strangers, by Robert V. Levine, American Scientist, 2003 describes how people treat appeals from strangers in different cities. The author claims that people all over seem to have pretty much the same instincts to help strangers, but they learn to ignore it more in some places than others, often for very good reasons. The immediate local environment seems to have the power to dampen our sympathy.

An excerpt:

The bulk of the evidence indicates that helping tends to be less dependent on the nature of the local people than it is on the characteristics of the local environment. And investigators have demonstrated that seemingly minor changes in situation can drastically affect helping—above and beyond the personalities or moral beliefs of the people involved. It is noteworthy that studies show the location where one was raised has less to do with helping than the place one currently lives. In other words, Brazilians and New Yorkers are both more likely to offer help in Ipanema than they are in Manhattan.

Yet the cause of civility in cities like New York and Kuala Lumpur may not be hopeless. Just as characteristics of the situation may operate against helping, there are ways to modify the environment so as to encourage it. Experiments have shown, for example, that reversing the anonymity and diffusion of responsibility that characterize life in some cities—by increasing personal accountability, or simply by getting people to address one another by name—boosts helping. In a 1975 experiment at a New York beach, Thomas Moriarity, then a social psychologist at New York University, found that only 20 percent of people intervened when a man (actually one of the experimenters) blatantly stole a portable radio off of the temporarily abandoned blanket next to them. But when the owner of the radio simply asked her neighbors to keep an eye on the radio while she was gone, 95 percent of those who agreed stepped in to stop the snatcher.

Inducing a bit of guilt—by making people aware that they could be doing more—also seems to make a difference. Perhaps most promising is the observation that helping can be effectively taught. Psychologists have found, for example, that children who are exposed to altruistic characters on television tend to mimic them. And, because prosocial exemplars in real life often induce others to follow suit, any increases in helping are potentially self-perpetuating.

Might a kinder environment eventually raise the level of helpfulness in New York? This city is leading a nationwide trend and currently enjoying a wave of crime reduction. (Statistics indicate that fewer New Yorkers are doing each other injury today than in the recent past.) Could diminished worries over street crime free more people to step forth and offer one another aid, strangers included? Our experiments do not address variations over time, but I suspect that little will change. After all, the reduction in the number of harm-doers does not necessarily imply that there will be greater quantity of altruism practiced. And there is little doubt that the drunk man I watched people sidestep when I was six would be even less likely to receive help from a passing stranger today.

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