The effects of ethnicity, gender, and urgency of a message on prosocial behavior

A study by Christensen et al. (1998) looked at prosocial behavior toward strangers via responses to wrong-number messages on a telephone answering machine and found a higher than anticipated prosocial response. However, additional research was required in order to determine whether or not manipulation of gender and ethnicity would have produced different results. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of gender (male or female) of the caller, ethnicity (white-non Hispanic or Mexican American) of the caller, and urgency ("low," "medium," "high," & "high with prod") of a message on telephone helping behavior. One hundred and sixty subjects, who subscribe to Sprint(c), were randomly selected and assigned to one of sixteen experimental conditions. The results of this study did not indicate any significant main effect for gender, ethnicity, and urgency.