# Where We Are Shapes Who We Are

1 Opinion June 14, 2013 ![](/sites/default/files/styles/246w/public/assets/images/con_039609.jpg?itok=CCpkQx8H) By Adam Alter > It’s comforting to believe that there’s an essential version of each of us — that good people behave well, bad people behave badly, and those tendencies reside within us.

In the early 1970s, a team of researchers dropped hundreds of stamped, addressed letters near college dorms along the East Coast and recorded how many lost letters found their way to a mailbox. The researchers counted each posted letter as a small act of charity and discovered that students in some of the dorms were more generous than others.

Nearly all of the letters dropped near uncrowded dorms — residences where comparatively few students lived on each floor — reached their intended recipients. In contrast, only about 6 in 10 of the letters dropped near crowded dorms completed the journey.

Apparently, the students in high-density housing, where everyone was packed close together, felt less connected to their college mates and this apparently dampened their generosity.

Later, when the researchers asked a different collection of students to imagine how they might have responded had they come across a lost letter, 95 percent of them said they would have posted it regardless of where they were living.

Read the full article as published in [*The New York Times*](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/a-self-defined-by-place.html?_r=1&).

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*Adam Alter is an Assistant Professor of Marketing with affiliated appointment in the Psychology Department.* ###  More Opinions from Adam Alter

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