Affiliation, Community Size, and Destination in Return of Lost Letters

Abstract

Two field studies used 2400 “lost letters” to test the hypothesis that return rates would be greater from smaller rural communities (population Ms = 1729) than from a city (population M = 60,591), unless the addressee was affiliated with a socially or politically deviant group. Addresses' affiliations were significantly associated with different rates of return in both studies. In Study A, community size and addressees' affiliations were significantly associated with different rates of return in the city and smaller rural communities, rates generally being greater in the city even when the people in need of help were affiliated with the deviant “For Prostitution, or Female and Male Sex Workers.” Destinations were not associated with return rates in either study. In Study B, community size and addressees' affiliation were significantly associated with different rates of return in only smaller rural communities. Return rates were lower than those from the city except when the person was affiliated with the deviant “NORML or Legalized Prostitution” addressees.

Using the lost letter technique to measure real-life behavioral effects of alcohol use

“…Notably, the overall return rate found here was virtually identical to those reported in earlier work (Bridges et al, 1998(Bridges et al, , 2000a(Bridges et al, , 2000b(Bridges et al, , 2002; apparently, the willingness to display altruistic behaviors has not diminished over the years. It was expected that for people more likely to have consumed alcohol (i.e., during late bar hours), lost-letter return rates would be lower than for people who found the lost letter in their lunch break.…”

“…This is in line with the previous lost letter designs in which 32.3% (Bridges et al, 2002), 34.1% (Bridges et al, 2000b), 39.9% (Bridges et al, 2000a), and 40.3% and 45.4% (Bridges et al, 1998) were returned.…”

“…To our knowledge, this study was the first to use the LLT to map human behavior in relation to alcohol intake. The striking resemblance of the overall response rate found here with those of other LLT researchers (e.g., Bridges et al, 1998Bridges et al, , 2000aBridges et al, , 2000bBridges et al, , 2002 suggests that this method is suitable for this type of research questions. The LLT could be highly useful in studying the effects of alcohol intoxication in the wild, effectively circumventing the problems of social desirability and ethics, that plague more controlled studies.…”

“…Subsequently, they explored the effects of various dimensions of the addressee, depending on community size. It turned out that, although in general smaller communities have higher return rates, especially in small communities, lower return rates were found when the addressee was deviant, i.e., "For Prostitution, or Female and Male Sex Workers" (Bridges et al, 1998). Other manipulations of the addresses were explored, such as in-county and out-county post boxes (Bridges et al, 2000a), "personhood" by adding a person's name on the address (Bridges et al, 2000b), or campaigns supporting versus opposing gay and lesbian teachers in communities known to be either "anti-gay" or "gay-friendly" (Bridges et al, 2002).…”

Moving from Urban Sociology to the Sociology of the City

“…Bridges et al 1997;Bridges and Rodriguez 2000;Sampson 2012). These varying return rates are taken to indicate differences in the level of trust across cities.…”