RESPONSIBILITY, RECIPROCITY, AND SOCIAL DISTANCE IN HELP-GIVING - EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF ENGLISH SOCIAL CLASS DIFFERENCES

As a partial replication of an experiment with American male adolescents, an experiment was conducted with 192 white teenage volunteers from the state schools in Oxford, England. The subjects, who came from either bureaucratic middle-class or working-class families, had an opportunity to help a peer after they themselves had received great or little assistance when they were in need of help. This other person was either the same, or not the same, person they had encountered earlier and, supposedly, was from either a middle-class or a working-class background. As in the American study, the help-giving by the bureaucratic middle-class subjects was relatively unaffected by the level of assistance they had received earlier, and these boys were said to display a responsibility orientation. Unlike their American counterparts, however, the Oxford working-class boys tended to exhibit a strong reciprocity orientation in that their help-giving was greatly affected by the level of help they had gotten earlier. These reciprocity tendencies were most pronounced when the person the boys could help came from a different social-class level. It is suggested that the American group possessing the strongest reciprocity orientation (boys from entrepreneurial middle-class families) showed essentially similar behavior. Finally, the work for the dependent person did not parallel liking for him in cither the responsibility-oriented bureaucratic middle-class group or in the reciprocity-oriented working-class group. © 1968.