Thursday June 22, 2006
Courtesy poll only for cities
By ROYCE CHEAH
PETALING JAYA: The Reader’s Digest survey that rates Kuala Lumpur as the third-worst city in terms of courteousness should not be generalised to all Malaysians as it was only meant to examine urban dwellers.
This was explained by Reader’s Digest editor-in-chief for Asia Jim Plouffe who said the global test of 35 cities was to analyse urban behaviour.
Commenting on the report, Plouffe said two researchers (a man and a woman) were sent out to various parts of Kuala Lumpur, including the areas around KLCC, Pandan Indah, Gombak and the streets and malls in the Bukit Bintang area.
The three tests they conducted were whether shopkeepers said “thank you” after a small purchase, dropping papers to see if anyone helped to pick them up and holding a door long enough so that it does not slam in a person’s face.
Plouffe said the magazine had thought long and hard about what tests to use and eventually felt that these three were universal enough in scope to test human behaviour and courteousness.
“I had been asked about the tests many times and I can also assure you the demographics and factors were considered before anyone was tested. There was a fair representation of age groups, sex, small and large shops and ethnicity,” he added.
Each test was conducted 20 times and the Malaysian capital scored 45% (32nd out of 35 countries) for the “purchasing test,” 30% (20th out of 35) for the “dropping paper” test and 35% (25th out of 35) for the “holding door” test.
This gave Kuala Lumpur an aggregate score of 37%, rating it the third-worst out of 35 cities – followed by Bucharest and Mumbai respectively.
Among the nine Asian cities tested, Kuala Lumpur tied with Taipei and Mumbai for second place in the holding door test, tied at fifth with Singapore and Mumbai for the dropping paper test and was seventh in the purchasing test. The other Asian cities included in the test were Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Seoul.
Plouffe said that the purchasing test was to gauge general politeness; the dropping paper test was to see a person’s empathy towards fellow humans and the holding door test to check if people were aware how their actions would affect others around them.
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