Helping hands follow similar patterns around the world

Cooperation is a crucial part of human life, even if we don't always cooperate with one another. Recent research shows that no matter our culture, we all seem to engage with requests for help in some similar, predictable ways.

Using field work methods and recordings of life in a number of different cultural and geographical settings, a new study in Nature's Scientific Reports has found a number of shared principles of cooperation that cross cultural boundaries. People around the world perform frequent requests for assistance, most of which are successful, and when requests for help are declined, clear reasons are given. This seemingly universal pattern points to what the authors call a "common foundation" for cooperation. 

For the team's investigation, they established field sites around the globe to gain access to both WEIRD and non-WEIRD participants. Sites were established in the UK, Italy, Poland, and Russia to gather WEIRD participants, while communities that spoke Cha'palaa, Lao, Murrinhpatha, and Siwu represented non-WEIRD groups. 

Across all these locations, the team collected video recordings of social interactions in which non-strangers interacted in familiar environments. Recorded activities included cooking, doing housework together, spending time talking, or playing games — though activities differed across different cultures. In Murrinhpatha, for example, most activities happened outside due to overcrowding in houses, while the Polish footage mainly focused on domestic activities. Footage was also prioritised where interactions occurred both amongst families and non-family members such as friends, colleagues, or neighbours. 

The team looked for three kinds of reactions to requests for help: compliance, rejection, or ignoring the request for assistance. Four key principles underlying prosocial behaviour emerged across all cultures. 

The first is frequency; the team found that requests for help are extremely common both in families and beyond, occurring on average once every two minutes. There was, however, some cultural variability. For example, task-focused interactions like cooking feature more requests for assistance than talk-focused interactions, therefore cultures with higher levels of task-focused interactions naturally feature more requests for help. 

Complying with requests is also extremely common. Analyses showed that, on average, people comply seven times more than they reject requests for help, and six times more than they ignore them. This happened across both cultures and various types of relationships. Notably, Murrinhpatha speakers in northern Australia were the only group that differed significantly in their willingness to help. Members of this group were more likely to ignore requests than other cultures, who largely did not differ.

How people respond to requests also followed similar structures across cultures. Compliance was largely non-verbal, while rejections were largely verbal. Similarly, there was asymmetry between compliance and rejection in how people rationalised their choices. When people complied, they largely did so without explanation. When they declined, they usually gave a reason.  

Previous research on prosocial behaviour and resource-sharing has found huge cultural differences — largely, the authors of this paper argue, because those studies focused on high-stakes decisions, which are less likely to reflect more foundational human tendencies. This study, on the other hand, looked at the everyday, low-cost transactions between people that make up the bulk of normal human life and fulfil immediate and practical goals. 

Further research could extend these findings, looking at interactions amongst strangers and in more formal settings. What happens when people don't engage in such behaviours, and instead engage in "deviant" behaviour, such as consistently rejecting requests for help, could also be interesting to explore. 

Though asking for help whilst cooking or doing the dishes may seem small-scale and low-stakes, their importance should not be understated. As the team concludes, the social effect of such actions accumulates, and have a huge impact on how communities and relationships are structured. Crucially, this behaviour was not as susceptible to cultural variation as larger events more clearly located in the political realm. Understanding them as such is therefore a way of understanding how society operates — and offers an optimistic view of human nature as fundamentally based on cooperation, collaboration, and respect.

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-30580-5