Toronto flunks 'friendly' test
LOUISA TAYLOR
TORONTO STAR
You're hustling along a downtown sidewalk during rush hour, your mind on the clock and all the things to be done before the day is through. You see a young man standing still amid the crush of pedestrians, map in hand. He looks pleasant, but befuddled. Clearly, he could use some directions.
Do you help him out?
If you're in downtown Toronto, probably not. If, however, you're in Ottawa or Vancouver, you're likely to stop, consult the map, tell him exactly which street to take, where to turn and which bus to board. If you're in Montreal and the young man asks for directions, you might shrug and say, "You've got a map — just read it."
This is what psychologists call "helping behaviour" — friendliness, really — and after a wholly unscientific test of such behaviour in seven cities across the country, the Star can report that Torontonians do not do well when it comes to helping their fellow citizen. We know this because we sent reporters out in seven locations — Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, downtown Toronto and York Region — to conduct a series of not-so-rigorous tests to gauge friendliness.
The tests were based on research conducted by California psychologist Robert Levine, who has spent the past 15 years studying how people behave in cities, specifically, how helpful they are to strangers. Levine has conducted his tests (with considerably more rigour) around the world, in places such as Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, New York and Stockholm, but he hasn't come to Canada. To correct this oversight, the Star adapted two of Levine's tests and made up one of our own: standing on the street with a map, looking lost; dropping a pen and seeing if anyone picks it up to return it; and seeing if strangers acknowledge you with a smile or wave in a public place.
All three tests were designed to see how far city-dwellers would go out of their way to help a stranger. Would they point out that you'd dropped your pen and keep walking, or would they pick it up and hand it back to you? The key was to not ask for the help but demonstrate a need. Most people feel obliged to help if asked; it is more telling to see who volunteers.
"What we're talking about is the quality of public life," says Levine. "If it's the norm for people to smile at each other or be polite to each other, that makes a difference from living in a place where it's the norm to retreat from other people. I don't know that you can draw direct consequences from this, other than the fact that it makes for a more pleasant, interesting environment."
With the Star's Vital Signs series exploring traditional quality-of-life indicators such as housing, employment and transit, we thought it might be revealing to take a look at how Toronto measures up on an untraditional indicator: friendliness. And when the scores were tabulated and assembled in a nifty chart, the verdict was clear: people in Winnipeg and Vancouver — everywhere else in fact — were much nicer to our testers than people in downtown Toronto and York Region.
In Vancouver, a retiree with a passion for his city helped reporter Dan Girard almost as soon as he produced a map. The same thing happened to our tester in Ottawa, reporter Mary Gordon. But in Toronto, map helpers were few; at one point reporter Andrew Chung lingered on the sidewalk at Queen and York Sts. for half an hour with no assistance.
In Winnipeg, Girard found people keen to live up to the slogan on the province's licence plates: "Friendly Manitoba." When he dropped his pen, four out of 10 people called out to him, another picked it up for him and yet another ran after him to return it.
"What if it was your only pen? Then you'd have trouble," said Suzie Wong, a 31-year-old market researcher, when asked why she helped.
When we did the pen test near Bay and Adelaide Sts. on a weekday afternoon, it was stolen on three occasions. In Montreal, it was stolen twice during testing on Maisonneuve Ave. In one case, reporter Miro Cernetig watched as a man picked up the pen (a cheap disposable) and disappeared into an office building. When Cernetig caught up to the man to ask why he had taken the pen, the man said, "You want to call security?"
We tried the tests in the 905 area to challenge the urban vs. suburban myth, the cold city vs. the friendly 'burbs. According to these tests, the suburbs can teach the city a thing or two about alienation. However, as Levine notes, "one of the things you find when trying to do field experiments in suburban cities is the difficulty in finding pedestrians on the street."
So our Toronto tester, reporter Chung, went to the Markville Mall in Markham to drop his pen and peer at his map. On both counts, he came up nearly empty. Only two people out of 10 picked up his pen and returned it to him. And he couldn't get anyone to help him with directions, even when he moved from the mall's entrance to a busy gas station in Vaughan and spread the map on his car's trunk for 30 minutes.
"Despite other motorists stopping in to get coffee or fill up, not one inquired as to whether I needed help," says Chung. "It was just in the car, get out of the car, get back in the car and go."
Most of our testers outside of the GTA felt the test scores failed to match up with their impressions of a friendly city. In Halifax, reporter Kelly Toughill was shocked that no one offered directions and few helped with the dropped pen. Toughill says Halifax would come out on top if another indicator of civility was used: respect for pedestrians.
"Every time I stopped on a sidewalk to ponder my next move, even when I had no intention of crossing the street, traffic suddenly halted in both directions," Toughill says. "This happened five times mid-block, nowhere near a corner or pedestrian crossing."
In his research, Levine has found that population density is a good indicator of helping behaviour; the more crowded a city, the less helpful people are likely to be. And he says it has more to do with environment than character. Latin cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and San Jose, Costa Rica, where a premium is placed on being simpático, fared the best in his global measurements, while New York City came out last or second last on most of the tests.
"What you're getting at with studies like this is outward norms, not what people are like on the inside, but rather how they're expected to act publicly," Levine says. "There are some places where it's assumed you'll act with a certain degree of civility. Even if a person is a nasty person, they feel pressure to act nicely on the outside."
Maybe Torontonians need to feel a little more pressure.
with files from Miro Cernetig, Andrew Chung, Mary Gordon, Dan Girard and Kelly Toughill |
