THE RESPONSE TO OLD PEOPLE WHO ASK FOR HELP: FIELD EXPERIMENTS.
Item
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Title
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THE RESPONSE TO OLD PEOPLE WHO ASK FOR HELP: FIELD EXPERIMENTS.
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Identifier
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AAI8103967
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identifier
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8103967
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Creator
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WEINBERGER, ARTHUR.
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Contributor
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Stanley Milgram
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Social
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Abstract
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Because of the paucity of research concerning helping behaviors toward the elderly, conflicting hypotheses about how the elderly would fare in comparison to younger adults when seeking assistance, and because of pragmatic and theoretical issues, three experiments were devised and conducted in order to examine the frequency of helping behaviors toward young, middle-aged, and old adults. Two out of the three experiments revealed a positive relationship between the age of the help-seeker and the frequency of assistance. Middle-aged adults were helped significantly more often than young adults, and old adults were helped significantly more frequently than middle-aged adults. In order to understand why the elderly received assistance more frequently than younger adults, the help-seekers were evaluated on a number of semantic-differential scales. The results indicated that the elderly project a combination of both "negative" and "positive" characteristics. This combination predisposes persons to favor the elderly over other groups in providing assistance. The relationship between the age of the help-seeker and the frequency of assistance was attenuated in the remaining experiment because the age and related characteristics of the help-seeker were made less salient.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
