According to a new study, strangers are less likely to come to your assistance if they’ve just exited a luxury store, or even if you just happen to be in an exclusive part of town with lots of pricey shops. Past research has already shown that reminders of money and materialism encourage us to be more selfish and less helpful, presumably because of the connotations of competition and self-sufficiency. But nearly all this evidence comes from lab studies and the findings haven’t always held up to repeated testing. The new research is a series of field studies. Students working for the researchers pretended that they needed help in a range of shopping locations across Paris including the avenue des Champs-Elysées, avenue Montaigne, the place Vendome, as well as nearby residential streets such as the rue de Marignan. The consistent finding across the studies was that people were far less likely to help if they’d just been shopping in a luxury store or even if they just happened to be walking along a street with an abundance of luxury stores. For example, in the first study, 77.5 per cent of passersby were helpful on an ordinary street compared with 35 per cent of those who had just exited a luxury store. The second study showed the mere presence of nearby luxury shops reduced helping behaviour to 23.2 per cent (in this case, the passersby were just near the luxury shops, they hadn’t necessarily been in them). And a final study confirmed that ordinary shops did not have this bad-Samaritan effect, only luxury ones did. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/04/2...help-each-other-out-when-near-a-luxury-store/ Paper: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15534510.2016.1160839
