Helping is influenced by economic environment

... Mais le narrateur est plutôt tenté de croire qu’en donnant trop d’importance aux belles actions, on rend finalement un hommage indirect et puissant au mal. Car on laisse supposer alors que ces belles actions n’ont tant de prix que parce qu’elles sont rares et que la méchanceté et l’indifférence sont des moteurs bien plus fréquents dans les actions des hommes...

Albert Camus
La peste

Helping is influenced by economic environment within the culture. In general, frequency of helping behavior is inversely related to the country economic status. It is true that appearances count as people make assumptions about the situation, but the deciding factor is the reaction of the people that first see the person in distress. The major explanation for people failing to stop and help a victim is how obsessed with haste they are. People who were in a hurry did not even notice the victim, although, once they arrived at their destination and had time to think about the consequences, they felt some guilt and anxiousness.



The possibility of enacting laws to punish passers-by who refuse to help people in obvious distress become a hot topic in the southern province of Guangdong, China in 2011. Legal experts and the public debated the idea after a hit-an-run victim was ignored by at least 18 passers-bys.

Yue Yue, the little girl victim, was finally moved to the roadside by a 57-year-old scrap collector, Chen Xianmei, who then called for the girl's parents. What Chen Xianmei did was to lift the brain-dead limp body of the child from the road and put it on the sidewalk before calling the mother. This trivial natural act that took her 12 seconds was deemed an heroic deed done for the sake of notoriety. The driver who first hit the toddler said in a telephone interview with a Guangdong television station that he had been talking on his phone when the girl walked in front of his vehicle. He said he kept driving because if she were dead, it would only cost him 10,000 to 20,000 renminbi ($1,500 to $3,000), but if she were alive, he would have to pay hundreds of thousands of renminbi in medical bills. As callous as this person might be, it is hard to believe that he would be so blunt on a public interview. Referring to the driver’s comments, one Internet user wrote, “If the compensation for a death were higher than the cost of medical care, these cases might not happen.” The writer added, it was “unrealistic” to expect a change soon, because for Chinese today, “all they can think about is food and clothes.”

The behavior of other people in similar situations suggest that it is indeed less of a trouble for the responsible party in a traffic accident to kill than to injure, and that, in any case, is not much of a deal if one has the right connections. Thus, the Chinese government has figure out yet another way to save a few renminbi by not requiring driver’s insurance and sending victims of traffic accidents to the trashcan if they happen to be poor.

China's population is split in two groups that the Chinese themselves call euphemistically city-dwellers (bureaucrats, technocrats, businessmen) and migrant workers (slave labor) . Chen Xianmei, the illiterate scrap peddler who picked up Foshan toddler Yueyue off the street, and who finally called for the little girl’s mother, illustrates of the moral and mental differences between the two groups. She left Guangzhou after being overwhelmed by media requests and offerings of cash. Chen's landlady even threatened eviction, due to the distraction of having media members lined up outside her apartment. Her neighbors claimed that she helped Yueyue to become famous. Dongguan, a home products company, gave her 100,000 RMB in cash, along with another 20,000RMB from the Foshan municipal government. Chen visited the hospital to see Yueyue's parents and give them all the cash she had received: "I don't even know how much this is. I've thinking only of the child, so I haven't even counted the money given to me these past few days. I've brought it all for the child." Chen left for her hometown of Qingyuan (清远) in Guangdong, to reunite with her husband. Chen had been working in Foshan since 2009 to be with her children.

 The Telegraph posts that pedestrians may have been afraid to help Yue Yue because of China's "compensation culture." The paper refers to a 2006 judgment in which a person who helped a woman get to a hospital was "wrongly ordered to pay her compensation." Bystanders who did intervene to help others have found themselves accused of wrongdoing. In China, one is not expected to help a victim of an accident and the government actively discourages such acts. The Health Ministry in September issued new “Good Samaritan” guidelines that essentially warn passersby not to rush to help elderly people on the ground, but to first ascertain whether they are conscious and then wait for trained medical personnel to arrive.

In the eastern province of Jiangsu, a bus driver named Yin Hongbing stopped to help an elderly woman who had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. But until he was vindicated by surveillance videos, Yin was the one accused of hitting the woman. There have also been several cases of passersby stopping to help elderly people who had fallen, or were pushed, and who then were sued by the victims or were arrested. The thinking here is: They must have been responsible or they would not have stopped to help.

 Empirical evidence and academic studies suggest that in an urban setting, the probability that a person in distress would be helped, depends heavily on the actions of the people present at the moment of the emergency and that the larger the crowd, the least likely help will be offered. There are many an example of this in the United States. The major explanation for people failing to stop and help a victim is how obsessed with haste they are.

Is there an absolute objective moral value? This is one of the first unsolvable questions of Philosophy. There are claims made by some that without God there would be no absolute morality. I do not follow the argument. The gist seems to be that since there is no objective basis for an absolute morality, and since an absolute morality seems to be a good thing, and since the existence of God would be an absolute reference, then God exists.

References:

CROSS-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN HELPING STRANGERS,
ROBERT V. LEVINE,
ARA NORENZAYAN,
KAREN PHILBRICK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helping_behavior

Washington Post Wang Juan report from Wenzhou.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Gang_incidenthttp://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/an-injured-toddler-is-ignored-and-chinese-ask-why/2011/10/19/gIQAxhnpxL_story.html?tid=sm_btn_twitterhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

http://ayn-rand.info/cth--25-Why_Did_Kitty_Genovese_Die.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

http://peopletriggers.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/the-six-weapons-of-influence-part-3-social-proof/

http://www.experiment-resources.com/helping-behavior.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/102780/7621597.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15382273

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15398332