Affiliation, Community Size, and Person-Positivity Effect in Return of Lost Letters

Abstract

A study using 1,008 "lost letters" was designed to test the hypotheses that returned responses would be greater in smaller rural communities than from cities, that addresses' affiliation with a group opposed to physical education in schools would reduce the return rate, and that a person-positivity effect would influence return rates. Community Size and Person-Positivity conditions were not significantly associated with different rates of return even though returned letters from the smaller rural communities were more frequent than those from the cities across addressee conditions. Findings seem to suggest no community bias in the willingness of people to help a stranger in need by returning a lost letter. Person-Positivity conditions did not seem to improve the technique. Both addressee' affiliations alone and community size and addressee' affiliations were associated with significantly different rates of return in smaller rural communities, with rates of return greater in the smaller rural communities than in the cities (except for the addressee opposed to physical education in schools).

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.…”

“…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). Turner and colleagues investigated the possible effects of altercasting in a study in which a hand written note was added to the lost letter instructing the finder to mail the lost letter which was placed behind the windshield of a car.…”

“…So far, LLT has predominantly focused on establishing differences between trait-like variables such as political attitudes and world views (but see Bridges et al, 2000b). In the current study, we tried to further extend the versatility of the Correspondence: Joris Van Hoof, Faculty of BMS, University of Twente, P.O.…”