As social creatures, humans have an innate desire to connect with others and help those in need. While cultural and societal differences can often shape how people approach helping behaviors, a recent study has revealed that the willingness to assist others is a universal trait across all human societies. The findings shed light on the fundamental nature of human compassion and suggest that helping others is an intrinsic part of our biology and evolution. In this article, we delve deeper into the study and explore how it can offer insights into social behaviors and the human experience.
A recent study published in Scientific Reports has found that, despite cultural differences, people across the world tend to help each other when they need assistance. Researchers conducted the study in a variety of locations, including the towns of England, Italy, Poland, and Russia, and the villages of rural Ecuador, Ghana, Laos, and Aboriginal Australia. They found that small requests for help are made approximately once every two minutes and 17 seconds on average, and that these requests are complied with approximately seven times more often than they are declined across cultures. Even when people do decline, they typically explain their reasoning, indicating a universal tendency to help others when needed and explain when such help cannot be given.
This study helps to solve a puzzle generated by prior anthropological and economic research, which has emphasized cultural differences in how resources are shared. For example, whale hunters of Lamalera in Indonesia follow distributional norms when sharing out a large catch, while Hadza foragers of Tanzania share food more for fear of generating negative gossip. This research has previously suggested that culture shapes our decisions about sharing and helping. However, this new study found that cultural differences were less influential than previously assumed, as our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible once we zoom in on the micro-level of social interaction.
Some key findings from the study include:
– Small requests for assistance occur frequently in everyday life around the world, and are much more common than high-cost decisions such as sharing the spoils of a successful whale hunt or contributing to the construction of a village road, decisions that have been found to be significantly influenced by culture.
– Compliance with small requests for assistance is universally preferred and unaffected by whether the interaction is among family or non-family.
– Members of some cultures ignore small requests more than others, but only up to about 26% of the time, suggesting a relatively higher tolerance for ignoring small requests may be a culturally evolved solution to dealing with pressure to comply with persistent demands for goods and services.
– When people provide assistance, this is done without explanation, but when they decline, they normally give an explicit reason (74% of the time), suggesting that while people decline giving help conditionally, they give help unconditionally.
Overall, this study suggests that while cultural differences may influence major decisions about resource sharing, they have less impact on our everyday tendency to help others when needed. These findings contribute to our understanding of cooperation and helping in our species and may be used to build more cross-cultural collaborations by highlighting our similarities as humans rather than differences.
