Research Suggests That Females Are More Helpful

Psychology is filled with examples of people witnessing a crime or an accident, and then simply turning a blind eye. So if you walked past an injured cyclist who was sitting at the side of the road, would you offer them help?

Researchers in Cambridge tested this scenario recently, where unwitting residents of Cambridge took part in a study examining their levels of empathy.

In their experiment, a researcher sat on the side of Trumpington Road, Cambridge, pretending to be injured, while they measured whether or not passersby stopped to help. However, the experiment didn’t stop there, as the pedestrians were approach by another researcher further up the road, who claimed that they were running an experiment on ‘memory’. The pedestrians were then asked to describe what they had seen along their journey.

The participants who then agreed to take parted were invited to complete an Empathy Quotient and Autism Spectrum Quotient in their own time. The results revealed that those who did stop to help the injured cyclists scored higher in terms of empathy than those who did not. There was no relationship between autistic traits and helping behaviour which led researchers to believe that empathy is the key factor. However, over 80% of the people who stopped were female.

Are field studies more valid?

Psychology students often use phrases like: ‘the study was conducted in the real world and is, therefore, more valid’. Bethlehem (2016) who conducted the study explained that conducting the test ‘in the wild’ improved the validity of their findings. “In this novel study we tested if empathy scores predict if people will act altruistically in a real-world setting”, he said. “Our results support the theory that people who do good are, at least partially, driven by empathy.” However, while the study may have high ecological validity, his research also demonstrates the difficulty of field work, as their small sample of 37 participants (19 males, 18 females) was derived from over 1,000 passers by.

To read the full article, Bethlehem et al., (2016), click here.

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