Mood and helping strangers: Revisiting Isen and Levin’s field experiment

• In Event: 30260 - Joint Roundtables: Section on Social Psychology and Section on Sociology of Emotions
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 4: Social Cohesion

Abstract

Helping is an essential norm facilitating the functioning of social relationships and societies. There are several aspects that influence helping behavior. One much-discussed factor is the mood of the helping person. The seminal study by Isen and Levin (1972) demonstrated this relationship in a field experiment. The random placement of a coin in a telephone booth was intended to put some of the test subjects in a positive mood (stimulus). The outcome was to help a confederate who dropped some documents. The authors showed that the positive mood significantly increased spontaneous helping toward strangers. However, replications and related field experiments are quite old, based on rather small sample sizes and present mixed results. The aim of this study is to replicate and extend Isen and Levin's (1972) experiment. We conducted a field experiment (N = 600) in parking garages of various supermarkets in Switzerland. As in the original study, positive mood was induced by placing a coin to be found by participants. As an extension of the original study, we induced negative mood by having a confederate bumping into subjects on their way into the market. The hypothesis is that positive mood will lead to more helping behavior and the negative mood to less helping. To measure helping behavior a confederate dropped a bag of oranges, and we observed if subjects helped to pick them up. In the original study, the person seeking help was always female. We extended the experiment by also including male confederates seeking help. The positive mood treatment elicited more helping behavior (41.6%) as compared to the control group (35%). Subjects in the negative mood treatment helped the least (23.9%). We interpret this finding as evidence for a positive monotonic effect of mood on spontaneous helping behavior.

Authors

• Fabienne Wöhner

• Axel Franzen, University of Bern