People worldwide signal for assistance every few minutes, and others comply with these small requests far more often than they decline, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports. The research, conducted by an international team of researchers from UCLA, Australia, Ecuador, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, examined behaviors in towns and rural areas in several countries. The findings suggest that people from all cultures have more similar cooperative behaviors than previously established by research.

The authors analyzed over 40 hours of video recordings of everyday life involving more than 350 people in geographically, linguistically, and culturally diverse sites. The analysis focused on sequences where one person sent a signal for help, asking directly or visibly struggling with a task, and another responded. The situations involved “low-cost” decisions about sharing items for everyday use or assisting others with tasks around the house or village. Such decisions are many orders more frequent than “high-cost” decisions, the types of decisions that are significantly influenced by culture.

People complied with small requests seven times more often than they declined and six times more often than they ignored them. People sometimes rejected or ignored small requests, but a lot less frequently than they complied. The preference for compliance was held across all cultures and was unaffected by whether the interaction was among family or non-family members.

The findings suggest that being helpful is an ingrained reflex in the human species. While cultural variation comes into play for special occasions and high-cost exchanges, cultural differences mostly disappear when zooming in on the micro level of social interaction. According to the study’s lead author, UCLA sociologist Giovanni Rossi, our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible. The research helps solve a puzzle generated by prior anthropological and economic research, emphasizing cooperation rules and norms variation.

References

• Ober, H. (2023, April 21). Small acts of kindness are frequent and universal, study finds. UCLA Newsroom; UCLA. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/small-acts-of-kindness-frequent-and-universal
• Rossi, G., Dingemanse, M., Floyd, S., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Kendrick, K. H., Zinken, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2023). Shared cross-cultural principles underlie human prosocial behavior at the smallest scale. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 6057. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30580-5