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.

The Immigration Debate Disrupts My Vacation

July 27, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I didn’t think I’d run into the immigration debate out here on the eastern reaches of Long Island. (I didn’t think I’d pick up an Internet signal here either. It’s weak, but enough to blog by.)

The Hamptons, summerplace of wealthy New Yorkers (This season there’s a rock concert series – Dave Matthews, Prince, et. al. Tickets will run you $15,000.) But the presence of Hispanics is obvious. The people who landscape the property of the wealthy, clean their swimming pools, wait on them in restaurants – many of them speak Spanish. So do the people who are building the new 7-figure houses.

That’s fine for the vacationers, the people who own these houses and come out here for weekends in the summer. But the immigrants are not seasonal; they have settled here, and that demographic change has created some tension with the other full-time residents. There have been a few nasty incidents. The public schools of East Hampton are now at least one-third Hispanic. The big issue, of course, is jobs.

“They really have to do something about this immigration thing,” says Joe, who now delivers heating oil. “I had a job in construction. I was making $35 an hour, which out here is pretty good. Plus benefits and a 401k. And one day my boss calls me in and tells me straight out: ‘Look, I can hire three illegals for $10 an hour. I get three workers, don’t have to pay benefits, and I still save $5.’ I mean these immigrants are really a problem.”

Joe called his US senators to complain. He called Sen. Clinton’s office so many times that eventually Hillary herself called him back. Joe’s animosity seemed to be directed mostly at the immigrants, especially illegals – some estimates put their number in the county at 180,000. But I asked him if the moral of his story wasn’t so much about the immigrants as about employers. Wouldn’t it be easier to enforce laws on a relatively smaller number of employers than on a relatively huge number of immigrants?

We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches . . .

July 24, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston


The blog is heading out to the beach and taking me with it. A week or so of sun and sand . . . unless the weather forecast is actually correct, in which case it'll be a week of clouds and rain. Either way, the blog and I may be oceanswept out beyond the reach of the Internet.

Thinking and Working

July 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Early in my teaching career, I was talking casually after class one day with a student. “What are you, some kind of intellectual?” he asked, more challenging than curious.

Well yes, I thought. Isn’t that a legitimate thing to be at an institution of higher learning? I had not yet gotten used to the very practical orientation most of my students had towards their education. They weren’t interested in ideas as such. They wanted to learn stuff that would allow them to get better jobs and make more money.

I was reminded of this again by a front page story in Sunday’s New York Times. “Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.” So said France’s new finance minister recently.
France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was elected on a platform of more work for the French people, who by law have 30 paid vacation days and one paid holiday each year. (The US, by contrast, has no law requiring employers to give workers even one paid vacation day. See my earlier blog post.) Apparently, M. Sarkozy’s government sees thinking as antithetical to working, and they are trying to change a long-standing French view about abstract thought.

It may be hard for those of us in the US to appreciate the status that thinking and ideas have in France. Intellectuals and philosophers become famous there – a line that goes from Descartes through Sartre to today’s Bernard-Henry Lévy, a name virtually unknown here but so familiar in France that he’s known by his initials, BHL. Sort of like ARod and JLo.

Intellectuals appear regularly on French TV and are allowed to speak at length, not the three-and-a-half minute interview or crossfire shouting match that passes for discussion on the US airwaves. We Americans want our answers short and, if not sweet, at least easy to grasp and to use. We are generally suspicious of intellectuals and of abstract ideas. Our orientation has always been more pragmatic.

Things haven’t changed much since deTocqueville, 170 years ago, opened Book II of Democracy in America with this:

Chapter I     PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD OF THE AMERICANS     I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them.

A few chapters later, “The Americans show a less decided taste for general ideas than the French. This is especially true in politics.”
DeTocquville attributes this disdain for abstract ideas to democracy, equality, and individualism. In an egalitarian society, where nobody is better than anyone else, each person relies on himself and winds up being able to manage very well, thank you. So if a person’s ideas are sufficient for his own life, what need does he have of other ideas?

As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of their understanding.

This orientation also leads to a focus on the concrete and a vague suspicion of abstractions, especially those that have no practical application

They like to discern the object which engages their attention with extreme clearness . . . . This disposition of mind soon leads them to condemn forms, which they regard as useless and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth.

But the French are more concerned with ideas and the logical connections among those ideas. Americans might reject a line of thought because it leads to nothing useful. The French might reject it if it is pas logique. Americans, on the other hand, are much more concerned with concrete facts.

Adam Gopnik, a journalist who lived in Paris for a while, describes his difficulties in France when he had to “fact check” an article. Fact-checking is standard procedure in American magazines: you call people mentioned in the article to make sure that the facts – dates, quotations, etc. – are correct. The French had never heard of such a thing (“What do you mean, une fact checker?”) and were suspicious when Gopnik explained.

Dubious look; there is More Here Than Meets the Eye. . . .There is a certainty in France that what assumes the guise of transparent positivism, “fact checking,” is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological coherence. That there might really be facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity; it would be naive to think otherwise. I was baffled and exasperated by this until it occurred to me that you would get exactly the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, post-interview, . . . . “In a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you.” Alarmed, suspicious: “A what?” “You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agreed with your conclusions, that there aren’t any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing.” . . . A theory checker? What an absurd waste of time, since it’s apparent (to us Americans) that people don’t speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is. (pp. 95-96)

Well, replace fact (and factual) for theory in that last sentence, and you have the common French view of fact checking.

Apparently President Sarkozy has his work cut out for him.