Robert V. Levine, a social psychologist who conducted attention-getting studies into how different cultures perceive time, how car dealerships persuade customers to buy and whether a blind person is more likely to be helped across the street in Nashville or New York, died on June 22 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 73.

His son Andy said the cause was heart failure resulting from an infection. His illness was unexpected; his son said that the two of them had just returned from a trip to Nepal and that his father had been in good health.

Professor Levine, who had taught at California State University, Fresno, for 45 years, made news in the mid-1990s with research that addressed civility and kindness. He and his students ran tests in cities large and small, looking for differences in responses to everyday help-a-stranger moments.

“We asked not for Schindler-like acts of heroism but for simple acts of civility,” he wrote in a 1995 essay about the studies in The New York Times. “Does a man with a hurt leg receive assistance in picking up a dropped magazine? Will a blind person be helped across a busy street? Is an ‘unnoticed’ dropped pen retrieved by a passer-by? Will a stranger try to make change for a quarter?”