Altruism and Imitation in Chinese and Americans: A Cross-Cultural Experiment

Summary A field experiment was conducted in Taipei, Taiwan, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A., to determine the effects of observing a model on accepting and actually mailing a letter. It was predicted that Chinese, being more conformist, would help less than more “materialistic” Americans in the refusing model and helpful rewarded model conditions, and more in the no model and helpful unrewarded model conditions. In fact, the only statistically significant difference found was that a higher percentage of letters accepted by Chinese 5s were actually received.