Although the urban environment is frequently accused of dehumanizing its inhabitants, the conditions responsible for such negative effects and the factors which may reduce the effects are little understood questions. The present study investigates the possibility that exposure to intense urban-like stimuli may make people less altruistic but that a perception of control over the environment can reduce its negative effects. Wohlwill (1972) has suggested that high levels of environmental stimulation may produce stress and have adverse effects on behavior. Similarly, other theorists have specifically proposed that urban stimulus overload can result in deindividuation (Zimbardo, 1969), lowered social responsiveness (Milgram, 1970) and pervasive feelings of helplessness (Darley & Latane, 1970). However, recent research has demonstrated that under certain conditions, an individual's perception of control over his situation can reduce the stressful effects of environmental stimuli (e. g., Glass & Singer, 1972;Lefcourt, 1973;Averill, 1973). To investigate these issues, the present experiment sought to create a stimulus overload situation analogous to the urban environment and in addition provided some subjects with a perception of potential control over the stimuli. Specifically it was hypothesized that given three stimulus conditions -(1) overload, (2) overload with perceived control, and (3) no overload -altruism, the dependent variable, would be lowest in the overload condition, intermediate in the perceived-control condition, and highest in the no-overload condition.
MethodSixty female subjects were recruited from students in a small liberal arts college and were paid $1.00 for their participation in the half hour experiment. Twenty were randomly assigned to each of the three stimulus conditions where they were run independently by a female experimenter. Immediately following the experiment an opportunity for altruism was provided when a female confederate who was blind to the subject's condition approached each subject and requested a favor. Subjects were told that the experiment dealt with processes of dual modality learning, and they were required to proofread a prose passage, underlining the errors as they read, while simultaneously attending to an audio taped series of,random numbers and noting the frequency of occurrence of the number &dquo;two&dquo;. In the overload condition the random numbers were superimposed over a background sound track of music and unrelated speech, while in the nooverload condition the background consisted of soothing white noise. In the perceived control condition, subjects heard the same tape recording as the overload condition but the instruction booklet for these subjects included a statement which said that subjects could signal the experimenter to have the background sound turned off whenever they wanted, that the choice was entirely up to them, but that the experimenter would much rather have them work with the background sound on. At the conclusion of these tasks, subjects fil...
