URBAN SIZE DIFFERENCES IN INCLDENCE OF ALTRUISTIC BEHAVIOR '

Summary.-Two field experiments using 828 "lost letters " tested the hypothesis that altruism would be higher in small urban communities or towns than in ciucs un-less che person needing help was a social deviant. The effect of deviance did alter return rates in both studies. In Study A, the effect of location and social deviance on altruistic responses from cities was generally greafer than from smaller communities, except when the person in need of help was &hated with rhe highly deviant prosti-tute conditions. In Study B, altruistic responses from cities were generally less than those from small towns even when the needy person was affiliated with the Commu-nist or needle-exchange conditions. Mdgram (1970) proposed an overload theory for urban and rural differ-ences in response to an altruistic model. He contended that city dwellers, in adapting to stimulus overload caused by increasing population densities, would curtail or lunit the depth and breadth of social contacts. Consequent-ly, Milgram (1970) suggested that people in cities would be generally more indifferent to unimportant others and less hkely to make distinctions be-tween unimportant others than would people in small towns. Hansson and Slade (1977) tested a Milgram-derived hypothesis regarding altruism, that is, that helping behavior will occur less frequently in urban than rural settings. Both Hansson and Slade (1977) and later Whitehead and Metzger (1981) reported that not only community size but interaction with deviant status af-fects altruism displayed to strangers. They addressed letters to fictitious per-sons, considered to ddfer in conformity to conventional social norms and, using the "Lost Letter Techniqueu (Mdgram, Mann, & Harter, 1965), at-tempted to measure helping behavior. Hansson and Slade's (1977) subjects were exposed to three possible experimental treatments: (a) a control ad