Class Finds NYC Selfless

An Urban Studies class at Barnard has discovered that New Yorkers may not be as cold-hearted as they seem. When they dropped wallets around New York City as part of a class assignment, 82 percent of the wallets were returned.

Greg Smithsimon, who teaches a seminar called Production, Consumption, and Control of Public Space, noted that the preconceived notions towards New York are varied. "Should we expect that first-years think of New York City as a post-Giuliani Disneyland, or as a post-apocalyptic city of chaos? My best guess is both."

Students were given wallets containing four dollars, an old metro card, and several of Smithsimon's business cards in case the finder wished to contact him. They then picked locations from Brooklyn to the Bronx, and dropped the wallets a total of 132 times. They were surprised by the high return rate: Only 2 percent of the wallets disappeared completely and 13 percent lay where they fell, unseen or ignored. Three percent of the wallet finders attempted to return them but failed, asking the wrong people if they had lost their wallets.

"Initially, I thought the project would be a failure," Diego Laserna, CC '07, said. "My stereotype of New Yorkers is of really stressed out, money-seeking people. I don't think I was really wrong, but I definitely have a more nuanced view." Laserna witnessed a man miss his train when he ran out of the subway to return a wallet.

Smithsimon was inspired by sociologist Jane Jacobs, who argued that cities are characterized by cooperation rather than chaos. But when Smithsimon brought up the notion of New York as a city of cooperation, "the students looked at me like I was crazy," he said. "They started giving examples of people having seizures on the subway while everyone looked on and did nothing."

Smithsimon said he has had many experiences to the contrary, including a woman who offered a water bottle to his thirsty son on the subway. "There is a quality of looking out for each other that is characteristic of New York. In Omaha, Nebraska, I know from experience, they'll run after you with 10 cents. They won't do that in New York, but they will with the important things, my stroller, my kid ..." joked Smithsimon.

The neighborhood with the worst return rate in New York City was the Upper East Side, a neighborhood with a median family income of $126,000. In that neighborhood, students watched as a woman carrying a bouquet of pink roses scooped up the wallet without ever breaking her stride. Although wallet-finders from the poorest areas of New York called to return the wallets, they never heard from the woman with the pink roses.

In 1994, psychologist Robert Levine dropped pens around New York to gage the responses of passers-by. With a 30 percent return rate, he concluded that New Yorkers are inherently selfish and non-cooperative. "Urban critics have demonstrated that squeezing too many people into too small a space leads, paradoxically enough, to alienation, anonymity and social isolation," he explained.

Levine, who has studied differences in cooperativeness in 34 cities, was most interested in how Smithsimon's students compared the differences within one city, from neighborhood to neighborhood or from subway to sidewalk. "What he's doing is looking at differences within a city. I've looked broader, I'm concerned with looking in the equivalent place in each city," Levine said.

But Levine is hesitant to make the claim that differences over time might lead to the higher rate of helpfulness in Smithsimon's study, especially because of the different props used. "The two studies are apples and oranges. We know that we can create a situation where everybody will help, or nobody," he said.

"The easy explanation at the time was that it [New York] was such a cold-hearted place," explained Smithsimon, who hadn't known of Levine's experiment beforehand. But his class did correctly predict that an object of more value would positively affect the return rate.

Smithsimon says that New Yorkers are actually more capable of cooperation than non-city-dwellers. "Most Americans today live in a car-centric society. They're never in the street like New Yorkers, they're never responsible for anything that goes on outside their car. So New Yorkers are more used to having a public self, a public persona," he said.

He cited the experience of one student wallet-dropper, who observed strangers come together as if choreographed to help return the wallet: a middle-aged woman observed the drop and yelled to a man standing closer to the wallet. The bystander then picked up the wallet and handed it off to two girls who ran ahead to the student to return it.

Smithsimon had expected a decent return rate, but didn't expect the amount of time he would soon be spending recollecting the wallets. "The worst was the phone. I would get a call, someone saying hey, you lost your wallet. And my instinctual reaction would be [clutches his back pocket] no I didn't! Or, they would say, hey, you were on the one train last night and lost your wallet, and I would think ... I wasn't on the--oh yeah ..."

Each student had his own method of wallet-losing. Ana Almanzar, GS '07, wrapped the wallet in her glove, and then while talking on a cell phone, pulled the glove out of her pocket, causing the wallet to fall to the floor. In one instance, in the Bronx, a woman ran after her and exasperatedly pointed out that she had dropped her wallet. A few days later, when Almanzar returned to the same spot to perform the experiment, the same woman noticed her dropping the wallet. Rather than becoming suspicious, the woman ran after Almanzar and gave her a talking-to. "She told me, 'You dropped your wallet again! You better put it in your bag!'" Almanzar said, giggling.

Smithsimon admitted that the study was unorthodox for his field. "This is not what urban studies ever really does, we're ethnographers, researchers. We observe the situation, never create it." Still, he is already planning for future experiments. "I don't want to make it (the wallet study) the cliche of my class," he said.