Study: Parks Make for Better People

"In two experiments, pedestrians who had just strolled through a beautiful park were more likely to come to the aid or a stranger who had just dropped a glove. Writing in the journal Environment and Behavior, Nicolas Guéguen and Jordy Stefan of the University of Bretagne-Sud refer to this as 'green altruism.'"

Of the study's findings, Jacobs adds, "women were more likely than men to be of assistance, and the female research assistants were more likely to receive help than their male counterparts. But the key finding was that 71.9 percent of people who had just emerged from the park warned the assistant of the dropped glove, compared to 55.6 percent of those who were entering the park."