On Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:34:51 -0700,Karl L Wuensch wrote: > That letter might have something valuable in it, say a ten pound note. >Returning the letter, rather than opening it and keeping any goodies inside, >is, in one sense, altruistic. Suppose Edward, who lives in the upscale >neighborhood returns the letter. So does Sammy, from a deprived neighborhood. >Are Edward and Sammy equally altruistic?
Interesting point. However, there may be more basic reasons to have doubts about the lost letter technique. Consider the following study: Gaylor M. Bolton (1974). The Lost Letter Technique as a Measure of Community Attitudes toward a Major Social Issue. The Sociological Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn, 1974) (pp. 567-570). NOTE: Milgram first published the lost letter study in 1965. The abstract from the article is provided below: |A test of the validity of Milgram's lost letter technique (LLT) to |measure community attitudes toward a sensitive social issue |about which there are strong emotional feelings was conducted. |This was accomplished by comparing the lost letter return rates |with the results of a questionnaire study which measured the same |attitudes in the same community. The sensitive social issue used |in this study was busing to achieve a racial balance. The data |from the questionnaire study indicated strong support for busing |by blacks and strong opposition to busing by whites. The results |of the lost letter technique were significantly different from those |of the questionnaire. The LLT found approximately the same attitudes |toward busing among both blacks and whites with almost half |opposed to busing while just over half supported busing. The ability |of the lost letter technique to provide a reliable unobtrusive attitudinal |measure on a sensitive social issue thus appears doubtful. Now, altruism isn't the same thing as attitude towards busing to achieve racial representation but it does suggest that one should have multiple measures of altruism to see if they converge to the same conclusion. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: Jim Clark [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 12:20 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Are Poor People Less Altruistic? Hi And how about the tidiness of the streets? Would amounts of litter differ between sections of town, making visibility of letter markedly different? Or the availability of mailboxes? Or people more likely to work in offices where they could easily drop off a letter? Or number of stay-at-home people with time to take letter to post office? ... Fun game! Take care Jim James M. Clark Professor of Psychology and Chair 204-786-9757 204-774-4134 Fax [email protected] >>> Michael Palij <[email protected]> 16-Aug-12 10:07 AM >>> 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.. --- 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=19786 or send a blank email to leave-19786-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
