‘Gotta Nickel?’ : Los Angeles psychologist Robert Butterworth took to the streets to learn more about how passers-by react to the upturned palm of a panhandler. As he tells Times staff writer David Haldane, he was surprised by what he found in his brief life as a bum.

I made one serious error during my first day as a beggar on the streets of Los Angeles.

“Gotta nickel?” I self-consciously asked a well-dressed passer-by.

“Sell your ring!” she scoffed, then marched off.

I glanced at my left hand: I had forgotten to remove the $1,000 diamond ring I’d worn for years. There it was, proclaiming loudly to the world that I was an intruder on alien ground. Feeling foolish, I quickly pulled it off my finger and placed it in a back pocket.

Then, bending my head slightly to assume a look of humility, I forced myself to continue my new-found avocation.

“Gotta nickel?”

I’m not really a beggar.

I’m a psychologist.

But I’ve always had a professional interest in people who live, by fortune or design, at the edge of society. Sometimes I imagine myself sitting in my office with large sections of the city of Los Angeles lying next to me on the therapy couch.

But I became interested in beggars, in particular, because one man I pass on the way to the post office every morning made me angry. He would just ask for a nickel or a quarter without bothering anybody. I never gave him any money.

I began noticing, however, that rather than ignore him, I was increasingly reacting with hostility. Where did he get off living this easy life and expecting the rest of us to support him with our hard work and lives full of schedules? Just who did this guy think he was?

Gradually the “objective” part of my mind took over. I grew interested in exploring my reactions to this man. Then, I started seeing articles from all over the country about a new spirit of meanness in the streets, about panhandlers evoking scorn rather than compassion from most Americans.

I decided to do a research project to find out how people in Los Angeles react to beggars. I could have done a series of interviews with panhandlers and their marks, of course. But I felt the results would be tainted.

How many people would really tell the truth? Not many, I suspected.

I decided on another approach. For seven days, I walked the streets of the city posing as a bum and asking for spare change.

Hidden underneath my shirt was a sophisticated tape recorder with two microphones recording every response. Few people knew what I was really up to was compiling enough data for a detailed chart outlining reactions to the panhandlers who increasingly dot their midst.

I realized, of course, that I wasn’t actually living a real beggar’s life. While most of them had only sidewalks for mattresses, I had a warm, safe bed to go home to at night. While they had to walk to get someplace, I could drive in my own car. And while they depended on the modest donations of strangers to keep body and soul together, I had the luxury of rejecting the proffered small change in favor of my own not-insubstantial income.

I decided to try panhandling because I wanted to know more about the moment of proffering: How, when confronted by a stranger asking for money, do most people react? Do they give or not? Do they acknowledge the beggar’s presence, or look away, pretending that he or she doesn’t exist? Do they become angry, heckling, insulting, or threatening? Or do they simply mind their own business, refusing to allow the intruder into their insulated worlds?

To make the project more scientific, I divided the city into seven demographic regions. I wanted to compare the reactions and behavior of the various groups that make up the city’s population. I also charted results according to race, gender and age.

What I ultimately discovered surprised me: Most people in Los Angeles aren’t that unkind to beggars; some, in fact, are nice to them. And while begging in the streets is tedious work and certainly is no way to earn even a poverty wage, people tend to interact with beggars on a human level.

That made me feel better about my environment. This may sound corny, but it also made me feel better about being an American.

Before I could find that out, of course, I had to transform myself into someone who looked like a beggar, a process that turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined.

I began by letting my beard grow for several days. I messed up my hair and, using my wife’s hair spray, lightened it to look somewhat older than my 43 years.

Finding the right clothes was a real challenge. I had an old pair of brown pants I used for painting. But the only old shirts I owned were expensive designer items with the labels intact. To effect a more realistic look, I removed the labels, or, in one case, folded the material so the label wouldn’t show.

I also had to figure out where to hide my beeper, so clients could reach me without blowing my cover. I ended up keeping it under my shirt, along with my car keys, several pieces of identification and--in case I was arrested--published accounts of former research projects. Undoubtedly, I was the only panhandler in Los Angeles with an American Express Gold Card.

Makeup proved useful. For days on the street, I used it to darken my stubble for a more pronounced, dirty look. And on work days, when I had to meet with patients (I still had to make a living through all of this), I used it to lighten the stubble so it barely showed.

I lived in dread of being recognized as a bum by one of my clients. Or worse, of running into friends and associates while begging.

Another problem was my white Lincoln Continental. Seeing a beggar getting into a car like that would surely have aroused the suspicions of police, who might have thought I was stealing it. To lessen that possibility, I stopped washing the car three weeks before the experiment began. I also routinely parked at least two blocks from where I was panhandling. (The one exception was downtown, which I got to by riding a graffiti-ridden RTD bus.)

To avoid detection in my disguise, I would wait until all of my neighbors had left for work each morning before sneaking into the garage of my mid-Wilshire Boulevard condominium.

After the first-day fiasco over the diamond ring, my days on the sidewalk settled into a fairly predictable routine.

“Gotta nickel?” I’d say with my head slightly bowed and hand out.

Or, “I need some money. . . . “

Those who ignored or heckled me, I’d let walk right on by. But when somebody offered money, I’d immediately return it, tell them who I was, and try to interview them on the spot.

The results were astounding.

Of the 1,465 people I asked for money, only 53--about one every 15 minutes, or 4% of those approached--actually gave me anything.

But even those who didn’t, generally acknowledged my existence in some way. About 70% shook their heads and said, “No, I’m sorry,” “Not today,” or “I don’t have any change.”

I was making less than minimum wage, but because people were being polite to me I wasn’t feeling rejected.

There were exceptions, of course.

One guy, responding to my “Gotta nickel?” snorted “got change for a hundred?” and kept walking. I felt like crawling under a rock. His taunting dismissal made me feel like a snail.

Another passer-by scornfully asked me why I wanted the money--whether I planned to use it to buy a feminine hygiene product. After the difficult day I’d had, I felt like punching him for his insensitivity.

And a third pedestrian launched into an angry tirade about panhandlers’ laziness, insisting: “85% of the people out here need to find jobs.” It was difficult to refrain from silencing him through humiliation by explaining just how wrong he was in my case. It made me angry to realize that someone would make such assumptions without knowing anything about me.

The passers-by who were the most abusive tended to be teen-age boys.

On the other end of the spectrum, interestingly, white males, ages 20 to 35, were the most likely to give money.

And somewhere in the middle were women of all races older than 40, who generally ignored my pleas entirely, maintaining a look of stony indifference as they kept their eyes riveted straight ahead. Their non-gazes made me feel like a non-person

I encountered the police only once.

“You can’t stand here,” a sheriff’s deputy told me on Sunset Boulevard one Saturday night near a heavy metal rock club. A bolt of fear flashed through me, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You’ve got to always be in motion,” he explained calmly.

So I kept on moving, always moving.

My best luck, by far, came during Earth Day festivities at Exhibition Park, where people could hardly get their hands into their pockets fast enough to honor my requests for spare change. They were a bunch of liberals gathered to save the world and humanity, after all, so how could they ignore such a blatant opportunity to help their fellow man? Their enthusiastic responses filled me with joy and relief.

Downtown Los Angeles was the worst panhandling area, probably because there are so many panhandlers that pedestrians feel assaulted.

And trendy Melrose Avenue, near all the art galleries, was somewhere in between: an area where I was able to collect some money, but still felt largely ignored. I ended up being disappointed by the response of the art crowd; somehow I’d thought they’d be different.

Most of the people who gave money told me they did it simply because it made them feel good. While one young man at the Earth Day gathering offered to give me a nickel in exchange for my signature on a petition to save marine life, most seemed to do it with no expectation of anything in return, and even with a desire for as little verbal interaction as possible.

“I’m a Christian,” one guy explained after I’d followed him for half a block, tugging at my sleeve to reveal the microphone as direct proof that I really was a researcher.

“The Bible says that if someone comes to your door and asks you for a drink of water that you give it to them,” the stranger said. “It’s not up to me to determine whether they need it or not. If they ask for it, I assume that they need it.”

A young woman said: “My mother brought me up to care for other people. I give money every day.”

As the days dragged on, the boundaries between my two selves gradually began to blur. Slowly, I took on the physical characteristics of a beggar. I began to walk like a bum, leaning forward with sort of a purposeful aimlessness. I found myself feeling kind of free out on the streets; I figured I was a bum so I could do anything I wanted.

Eventually, though, the elation turned to depression.

There were times when I just didn’t want to do it anymore and had to force myself out the door in the morning. I found myself counting the days until I’d have enough data to quit.

And by the time the project ended, I was more than happy to assume my old role.

So what did I learn from the exercise, besides that it may be unrealistic to expect people to take seriously a man who constantly talks into his sleeve?

For one thing, I learned that being a beggar is darned hard work. It’s difficult on two counts: mentally and physically.

It’s psychologically tough work because you have to stand there hour after hour, maintaining an attitude of engaged humility, risking (and sometimes experiencing) rejection at every turn. That is emotionally draining, and spiritually demeaning.

Begging is demanding physically because some of the basic biological functions the rest of us take for granted can be major ordeals for panhandlers. This was brought home to me the first time I needed to use the bathroom while on the “job.” Following my usual procedure, I walked into a restaurant and asked to use the facilities. Nothing doing, I was firmly informed. Thereafter, I made sure I went to the bathroom before leaving home or panhandled near a McDonald’s. I now understand, however, why our city streets are as soaked with urine as they are.

The second and most important thing I learned is that people in Los Angeles, whether or not they are generous, are not unkind to the beggars of their city. If they can give money, they will, and if they can’t or won’t, they are generally willing to acknowledge a fellow human being. Outright hostility is rare.

Have these realizations changed me? You bet they have.

For starters, I don’t expect to get angry at panhandlers anymore. Their lives are hard and they deserve our compassion rather than our scorn. When you pass a beggar you should give him money or not give him money, but you definitely shouldn’t give him a hard time. I think I’m going to start giving money to beggars.

And, finally, the experience boosted my morale.

There is so much we hear that’s negative about our city: the gangs, the violence, the graffiti. What this experiment taught me is that, despite everything, there is a still a basic reservoir of caring among us, a core of humanity.

It made me want to do something nice for all those people who were being so nice to me. Like take out a stack of $100 bills and give one to each person who gave me a nickel.

Ultimately, the experience made me feel better about my fellow humans and left me with a bit of advice to impart.

The advice is this: If you’re feeling down on life, try begging. It might just change your attitude a bit.