“Can you clean that corner again?” “Give me a knife.” “Can you turn on that light?” “Drive those goats away.” In daily life, people seem to ask each other almost constantly for small help skills, on average every few minutes.
And so it goes all over the world. In three-quarters of the cases, the other person also complies with such a small request for help, usually without saying anything else, as a matter of course. If the request is rejected, the reason for the refusal is usually explained (‘I’m too busy’, ‘I can’t reach it’).
This is shown by an analysis of more than forty hours of video recordings of groups of two to nine people (average 3.7), consisting of family, friends and neighbors in a domestic environment. They cook together, eat meals, play games, do housework or just sit and talk together.
A total of 350 people from eight cultures around the world were filmed – from the Murrinhpatha speakers in Northern Australia, the Siwu in Ghana and the Cha’palaa in Ecuador to groups in Poland, Laos, Russia, England and Italy. There were hardly any cultural differences, write the researchers, including the Dutch linguist Mark Dingemanse (Radboud University) in Scientific Reports.
Minor cultural variations
Whether the persons were related or not did not seem to make any difference to mutual aid. Friends and neighbors were asked for help as often as family, and they gave help just as easily. During conversations, help was requested slightly less often than during joint activities, about once every five minutes. There was also an English conversation between two people in which not a single request for help was made for forty minutes. Requests about knowledge (‘what’s the name of your cousin’s wife again?’) were not counted, they were actions.
There were minor cultural variations. In England and Italy a request is more often asked as a question, probably because autonomy is important in those cultures. And because it was a question, the others in those countries responded slightly more often when they complied with the request: ‘Yes, of course’. The Murrinhpatha aboriginals in Northern Australia, on the other hand, relatively often – almost always silently – ignored a request for help. There, too, more than 60 percent of the requests were granted.
High stakes
Humans are considered unique within the primate order in their great tendency to cooperate and empathize, but much anthropological and psychological research often emphasizes cultural differences in that helpfulness. The researchers in Scientific Reports point out that these studies are almost always carried out with targeted experiments and games and often have a high stake: food or money. They filmed everyday life, without any direction or assignment. The cultural differences in helpfulness shown in worldwide experiments occur in special and costly matters, such as joint road building or the mutual distribution of special food. But those cultural differences quickly disappear when you zoom in on the everyday micro level.