Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Urban Civility: City Dwellers Are Not Less Prososcial Than Their Rural Counterparts

  • Research Article
  • Published:
Evolutionary Psychological Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Urban living is often thought to promote incivility, but the existing sociological evidence paints a mixed picture. We aimed to examine the urban incivility phenomenon from an evolutionist’s perspective. Small communities are expected to show a higher incidence of helping because the applicability of theories such as kin selection, direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity to acts of cooperative behaviour is augmented in small-scale demographic settings. Smaller communities have a reduced total pool of individuals to interact with, increasing the likelihood of encountering any given individual multiple times. This makes it easier for individuals to form cooperative relationships with one another, which may facilitate prosociality within smaller communities. Using the lost letter technique, our results show that city dwelling, compared with rural residence, per se does not negatively influence prosociality. This contradicts the expected erosion of cooperative behaviour in anonymous cities and adds to our understanding of the interplay between human macroecology and individual behavioural tendencies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Alesina, A., & La Ferrara, E. (2002). Who trusts others? Journal of Public Economics, 85(2), 207–234.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, R. D. (1987). The biology of moral systems. Carmel, IN: Hawthorne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Amato, P. R. (1981). Urban-rural differences in helping: behavior in Australia and the United States. The Journal of Social Psychology, 114(2), 289–290.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amato, P. R. (1983). Helping behavior in urban and rural environments: field studies based on a taxonomic organization of helping episodes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 571–586.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics 2013, Census of population and housing: socio-economic indexes for areas (SEIFA), Australia, 2011, cat. no. 2033.0.55.001, ABS, Canberra. Available from: http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/2033.0.55.0012011?OpenDocument. [7 May 2016].

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics 2014, IRSAD, Australian Government. Available from: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/2033.0.55.001main+features100042011/ [9 May 2016].

  • Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67, 1–48.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buchan, N. R., Grimalda, G., Wilson, R., Brewer, M., Fatas, E., & Foddy, M. (2009). Globalization and human cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(11), 4138–4142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Forbes, G. B., & Gromoll, H. F. (1971). The lost letter technique as a measure of social variables: some exploratory findings. Social Forces, 50(1), 113–115.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gintis, H. (2003). Solving the puzzle of prosociality. Rationality and Society, 15(2), 155–187.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goldman, M., Lewandowski, H. E., & Carrill, R. E. (1982). Altruistic behavior in rural and urban, residential and business areas. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 3(2), 155–160.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grueter, C. C., Ingram, J. A., Lewisson, J. W., Bradford, O. R., Taba, M., Coetzee, R. E., & Sherwood, M. A. (2016). Human altruistic tendencies vary with both the costliness of selfless acts and socioeconomic status. PeerJ, 4, e2610.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grueter, C. C., Westlake, G., & Coall, D. in prep. Absence of intergroup discrimination in a naturalistic helping task.

  • Hamilton, W. D. (1964a). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hamilton, W. D. (1964b). The genetical evolution of social behaviour II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 17–52.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hansson, R. O., & Slade, K. M. (1977). Altruism toward a deviant in city and small town. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 7(3), 272–279.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hill, K., Barton, M., & Hurtado, A. M. (2009). The emergence of human uniqueness: characters underlying behavioral modernity. Evolutionary Anhropology, 18, 187–200.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hill, J. M., Jobling, R., Pollet, T. V., & Nettle, D. (2014). Social capital across urban neighborhoods: a comparison of self-report and observational data. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 8(2), 59–69.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holland, J., Silva, A. S., & Mace, R. (2012). Lost letter measure of variation in altruistic behaviour in 20 neighbourhoods. PLoS One, 7, e43294.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kammann, R., Thomson, R., & Irwin, R. (1979). Unhelpful behavior in the street: city size or immediate pedestrian density? Environment and Behavior, 11(2), 245–250.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Korte, C. (1980). Urban-nonurban differences in social behavior and social psychological models of urban impact. Journal of Social Issues, 36(3), 29–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Korte, C., & Kerr, N. (1975). Response to altruistic opportunities in urban and nonurban settings. The Journal of Social Psychology, 95(2), 183–184.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Korte, C., Ypma, I., & Toppen, A. (1975). Helpfulness in Dutch society as a function of urbanization and environmental input level. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(6), 996–1003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lamba, S., & Mace, R. (2011). Demography and ecology drive variation cooperation across human populations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 14426–14430.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Latané, B., & Darley, J. M. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: why doesn’t he help? New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levine, R. V., Martinez, T. S., Brase, G., & Sorenson, K. (1994). Helping in 36 US cities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(1), 69–82.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levine, R. V., Reysen, S., & Ganz, E. (2008). The kindness of strangers revisited: a comparison of 24 US cities. Social Indicators Research, 85(3), 461–481.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Milgram, S. (1970). The experience of living in cities. Science, 167(3924), 1461–1468.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nettle, D., Colléony, A., & Cockerill, M. (2011). Variation in cooperative behaviour within a single city. PLoS One, 6, e26922.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (2005). Evolution of indirect reciprocity. Nature, 437, 1291–1298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Palmer, C. T. (1991). Kin-selection, reciprocal altruism, and information sharing among Maine lobstermen. Ethology and Sociobiology, 12(3), 221–235.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pepper, G. V., & Nettle, D. (2017). The behavioural constellation of deprivation: causes and consequences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e314.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • R Core Team. (2014). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reysen, S, and Levine RV. (2014). People, culture, and place: How place predicts helping toward strangers. In Rentfrow PJ (ed.), Geographical Psychology, pp. 241–60. Washington, DC: American Psychology Association.

  • Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: a multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277, 918–924.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Silva, A. S., & Mace, R. (2014). Cooperation and conflict: field experiments in Northern Ireland. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 281(1792), 20141435.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, D., Dyble, M., Thompson, J., Major, K., Page, A. E., Chaudhary, N., Salali, G. D., Vinicius, L., Migliano, A. B., & Mace, R. (2016). Camp stability predicts patterns of hunter-gatherer cooperation. Royal Society Open Science, 3(7), 160131.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Steblay, N. M. (1987). Helping behavior in rural and urban environments: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 102(3), 346–356.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Westlake, G., Coall, D., & Grueter CC. submitted. Educational attainment fosters unconditional helping behavior: a natural experiment.

Download references

Author information

Author notes

  1. Cyril C. Grueter and Grace Westlake contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Human Sciences, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, M309, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

    Cyril C. Grueter & Grace Westlake

  2. Centre for Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, 6001, Australia

    Cyril C. Grueter

  3. School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, 6027, Australia

    David Coall

  4. School of Medicine, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

    David Coall

Authors
  1. Cyril C. Grueter
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Grace Westlake
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. David Coall
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cyril C. Grueter.

Ethics declarations

Ethics was granted by the Human Research Ethics Community in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (National Health and Medical Research Council 2015; reference number RA/4/1/8257).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Table S1

(DOCX 30 kb)

Table S2

(XLSX 27 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Grueter, C.C., Westlake, G. & Coall, D. Urban Civility: City Dwellers Are Not Less Prososcial Than Their Rural Counterparts. Evolutionary Psychological Science 6, 14–19 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-019-00206-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-019-00206-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation