People are more helpful when in poor environments

Study of helping 'prosocial' behaviours in more than 500 adults finds that people are more likely to help others when they experience poorer conditions

2026-02-09

(Press-News.org) People are more likely to act helpfully in situations where there are poorer choices to give to others, according to a new study that tested willingness to help others in different contexts.

The paper, published in Nature Communications today (Monday 9 February), is the culmination of three studies involving more than 500 participants and led by academics from the University of Birmingham. The team, which also included academics from Oxford University and the University of East Anglia, found that when people were in a poor environment they were surprisingly more likely to help compared to the richer environment.

Dr Todd Vogel from the University of Birmingham, and first author of the paper said: “Our study shows that the different opportunities in daily life can make a significant difference in how willing people are to stop what they are doing to help others.

“Previous research has looked at how willing people are to be helpful or not, but we didn’t know that a key factor is the person’s environment and context they are in. We may not realise it, but the choices we encounter in everyday life can really impact our decision-making for ourselves and other people.”

“The results have real world implications across society. Helping behaviours are hardwired into the way we form and maintain communities, so understanding the different ways people respond to their environment when making decisions about whether to act generously is critical. If people are overwhelmed with a rich number and quality of choices about being helpful, it’s likely that it leads to more discerning choosing behaviour.”

Effortful behaviour The researchers looked at when people will stop watching a movie when prompted to ‘help’, in the form of giving monetary credits, to an anonymous other person.

In the study, the team told participants they were either in a ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ environment for different parts of the experiment. They showed them different opportunities that could give them a big reward with a high certainty or a small reward with a low certainty.

In the ’poor’ environment, people encountered many more bad opportunities that were a small, unlikely reward whereas in a rich environment, they were more likely to encounter a big reward with a high certainty. If participants accepted an opportunity, they had to stop the video and do something effortful, either squeezing a hand grip device very hard or clicking lots of boxes to better mimic conditions in real life where prosocial behaviour often involves physical effort.

Professor Patricia Lockwood from the University of Birmingham, and senior corresponding author of the study said: “One of the ongoing debates in social psychology is whether generosity is more common among people with lower income or financial wellbeing.

“We believe that our study is the first to robustly test the impact of people’s environment when making helpful decisions, and suggests that the environment has a significant impact, and that poorer environments can drive greater generosity. While other studies may show mixed results, the design of our study requires people to make a physical effort to act in a prosocial way. We believe that this mirrors reality and highlights how people act in the real world when faced with the choice to act helpfully or not.

“The next step is to conduct further studies in different populations that experience challenges in helpful behaviours, such as adolescents with antisocial behaviour and adult psychopathy. If we can change the environment and the different opportunities people encounter maybe we can also change how willing people are to stop to help others.”

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