What Makes Paris Paris?--Group Will Try to Measure Cities' Milieu

A group of soc rel researchers is journeynig forth -- vicariously -- from the fourteenth floor of William James to find out just what makes London London, Paris Paris, and New York New York. Stanley Milgram, assistant professor of Social Psychology, and the four members of his junior tutorial will spend the semester combining, in Milgram's words, "a passion for scientific measurement with an exquisite perception" of the elements that make up a city's atmosphere.

Search for Distinctive Characteristics

They hope to collect from volunteers short written reports of incidents that could give an insight into the distinctive characters of the three cities.

If they get the response they hope for from their classified ads in the CRIMSON and the "personal" column of the New York Times, the group will have hundreds of such reports. They will divide the incidents according to what they tell about the "character of everyday social contacts," Milgram explained yesterday. The project will deal with both such specific things about the cities as pacing (how fast people walk there), and such general topics as alleged French hostility to tourists.

Milgram emphasizes that the group is also pioneering a technique, hoping to come up with specific ways of measuring the milieu of any major city. Although he calls the project a "comparative social psychology of cities," such a study has never been done before.

"You read that Paris has good food, and that's about all,' Milgram commented. "There is the possibility that what we want is too evanescent to specify; I hope it is not."

The ideal, Milgram points out, is to actually go to the cities, to "buttress raw data with observation. Measurement without perception leads to a caricature." One of his thesis advises, for example, has studied the willingness of Parisians to help stranded tourists. He and a native Frenchman spent a summer asking random passers-by for directions (in French) and comparing the frequency of helpful answers. It was higher for the Frenchman.

Milgram hopes that if the project is successful, the students will publish the results. In the meantime, they will wait in William James for the first-hand accounts to come in the mail.