People Help Each Other Every Couple of Minutes, Study Finds

Summary

People signal a need for help remarkably often, roughly once every two minutes on average, and those requests are granted far more than they are refused, according to research published in Scientific Reports.

Scientists at UCLA and partner institutions analyzed more than 40 hours of video recordings of everyday interactions among over 350 people across eight cultures, including Aboriginal Australia, rural Ecuador, Ghana, Laos, Poland, Italy, Russia, and England.

They logged more than 1,000 small requests for low cost assistance such as sharing an item or helping with a household task.

Compliance dominated, running seven times higher than outright refusal and six times higher than ignoring, with people helping 79 percent of the time and rejecting or ignoring requests only about 10 and 11 percent.

Lead author Giovanni Rossi noted that cultural differences largely vanish at the micro level of everyday interaction, where the human tendency to help when asked becomes universally visible.

People who declined offered an explanation about 74 percent of the time while those who helped usually said nothing, pointing to a shared cross cultural foundation for cooperative behavior.