Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that new research coming from the University College of London (UCL) focuses on the relationship of class or SES differences with altruism. Using Milgram's "lost letter" procedure, the UCL researchers showed that letters dropped in wealthier neighborhoods were returned at a higher rate than lower class/SES neighborhood (they divided neighborhoods into quartiles with the first quartile representing the wealthiest neighborhoods and the difference in return rate between this Q1 and Q3 and Q4 [the poorest] were significant). One popular media account is provided by Science Daily; see:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815175047.htm The original research report published in PLoS One is available here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043294 I leave it to the interested reader to come up with objections to conclusions as well as study design (e.g., variables left out of the equation) but behaviorists might wonder why an internal state (altruism) is attributed as the cause of non-returned letters rather than, say, worse mail service in poorer neighborhoods or other environmental factors. NOTE: Why does Q1, the wealthiest neighborhood, have the largest N (N=105) than the other quartiles? NOTE#2: There could be another explanation but the researchers chose not to investigate it. It is suggested in the following quote from the analysis in the Method section: |We had also planned on using neighbourhood crime scores as |a predictor variable to attempt to disentangle the effects of income |deprivation and crime on levels of altruism, but due to strong |collinearity (r =0.90) between these two variables only income |deprivation was used in the final model. One wonders why income deprivation wasn't left out and crime score used. I guess they don't consider neighborhood crime levels as being relevant to picking up a letter on the sidewalk of a crime ridden neighborhood.. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=19775 or send a blank email to leave-19775-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
