Samaritans - Good and Bad

August 1, 2007Posted by Jay Livingston

There was an incident of bystander apathy recently. A woman was stabbed in a Wichita, Kansas convenience store and lay bleeding for two minutes before anyone called 911. The victim died, and it’s possible the two minute delay made the difference between life and death. At least five people saw her lying there and merely stepped over the body. One woman took a picture with her cell phone.

The story hasn’t gotten a lot of press, at least not yet. I found out about it via Brad Wright’s blog. But then, the Kitty Genovese incident in 1964 didn’t become famous until the New York Times did a front-page story on it two weeks later. It began, “For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”

What reaction there has been is remarkably similar to the reaction to the Kitty Genovese case. “What happened to our respect for life?” said the Wichita police chief, implying that at some other time people had more respect for life. In a similar way, many comments about the Kitty Genovese incident implied that New Yorkers were less compassionate or concerned or altruistic than were people in other places.

The big assumption behind this way of thinking is that people’s actions are caused primarily by inner qualities, by their character or personality. If an act can be classified as cruel, the person who committed it must have some inner trait of cruelty. If the act is brave, the person who did it must have some trait of bravery in his character. This thinking is then used to explain the behavior. The reason that someone acted with indifference was that he or she lacked the trait of compassion.

The trouble with this line of thought is that it places all the weight on internal factors like character and ignores the external pressures of the situation. Brad Wright’s commentary offers a more sociological explanation of bystander apathy: in order to decide if something is an emergency, we often take our cues from the reactions of others around us. If they act as though the situation is normal, we’re likely to accept that definition (Brad has an excellent first-hand example involving a drowning child).

One of the most important researchers on bystander apathy is John Darley. John gave me my first academic faculty job – a one-year fill-in guaranteed to end after two semesters. John called it “the folding chair in social psychology.” One of the grad students working with John was Dan Batson. I think Dan already had a degree in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and may have actually worked as a minister, but now he was working on his Ph.D. in psychology. (I also recall that he drove a sporty Fiat 124 white convertible).

Together, Darley and Batson devised an experiment that really shows the relative importance of external constraints relative to character traits. The subjects were all students at the Theological Seminary; these were people who took their religion seriously. Each seminarian was told that he would have to deliver a talk on the other side of campus. Along the way, each person would pass a man slumped in a doorway who would moan and cough. (Obviously to us now, though not to the seminarians then, the unfortunate wretch was part of the experiment.) The question was how much attention the seminarian would pay to this person in need of help.

Batson and Darley had two variables that they thought might affect the willingness to help. First, half the students were told that the subject they were to talk about was job opportunities in the ministry. The others were told to give a talk on the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). (For those who don’t remember, the parable tells of a Jewish man who was severely mugged en route from Jerusalem to Jericho. As the man, near death, lay on the road, a Jewish priest passed by but didn’t help; later a second Jewish religious official also refused to help. Only the Samaritan, presumably an enemy of the Jews, not only stopped to help, but gave the man a ride to town and paid for his food and lodging.)

You would expect that the students with this parable uppermost in their minds would be more likely to offer assistance, but as it turned out, this mental priming made no difference.

The other independent variable Batson and Darley manipulated was purely external: time pressure. Some of the seminarians thought they had plenty of time to get across campus; others were told that they were already late but should go anyway. This variable made a big difference. Over sixty percent of the unhurried offered some help; only 10% of those in a hurry.

When we hear of an incident like the one in Wichita, the first question we ask is often “What’s wrong with those people? What kind of person could ignore a victim in need of help?” But, as I’ve suggested before in this blog, these assumptions of character as the cause of behavior are usually off the mark. The same person who acts with indifference in one situation will act with altruism in another. So it’s more useful to ask what it is about the situation that causes so many people to act this way. As Dan Batson says, people can be very altruistic . . . under the right circumstances.