"Drop It" Experiment

By Yiler Huang

female - female: The woman will likely help because I feel like women will empathize each other.

female - male: The woman might help, because women are sometimes more empathetic.

male - male: The man will likely not help, according to my experience as a man, we are not very empathetic towards each other.

male - female: The man will possibly help because traditionally men are often taught to help women with carrying things.

After the experiment, I would say my hypothesis were quite accurate. In our observation, men rarely helped men but have a small chance of helping woman, and women helped both man and woman but helped woman more. Which matches most of my hypothesis. In the experiment, the most helpful group was women at school age. It seemed like they are more likely to help and they help both man and woman. The least helpful group was the old men. Out of all the subjects, only 1 old man attempted to help. I believe the reason why old people are less empathetic was because they didn't care very much about their personal images to other. On the other hand, I believe younger people were more likely to help because they cared more about how other people would think about them. Overall, I think the results match what I believed about men and women.

From the results, we can also see the patterns men and women have on the Big Five test. Women were more likely to help others because they usually have higher neuroticism and agreeableness. Which might make them feel bad when they did not help people around them who had troubles, and be more considerate about people around them. We learned that men usually have higher level of extraversion, but it seemed like it does not make them help people more from our data.