Samaritans - II

August 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s an early scene in the 1969 movie “Midnight Cowboy.” Joe Buck, just arrived in New York from Texas, is walking up Fifth Avenue and sees a man obviously in need of help lying unconscious on the sidewalk outside Tiffany’s. He starts towards the man, but then notices all the other people walking past as though the man either didn’t exist or didn’t need help. And then, taking his cue from the others, he continues on his way, though with a worried glance back at the man on the sidewalk.

It’s a perfect example of bystander apathy, the topic of the previous blog posting. My point was that bystander apathy arises not from bad individual character traits but from normal social processes: faced with unfamiliar circumstances, we look to others for a definition of the situation. What do we do when something seems unusual but everyone else regards it as normal? (This was a standard set-up for countless episodes of “Candid Camera.”) We may feel uncomfortable, but we’d also feel uncomfortable going against what appears to be the norm.

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni also blogged about the Wichita incident. To his credit, Etzioni doesn’t take the “what’s wrong with people today?” line. He is well aware that if you want to change the amount of some behavior, you don’t get very far by trying to change people’s character. You’re much better off trying to change the situational circumstances.

Etzioni recommends that the US adopt “Good Samaritan” laws (also called “duty to assist” laws) that allow for the prosecution of people who fail to provide reasonable assistance. He acknowledges the difficulties of enforcement (what is “reasonable”?), and he doesn’t try to refute the argument that such laws would have no effect on behavior. Remember those seminarians who saw a man in need of help while they were en route to give a talk about the good Samaritan? (If you don't remember, see the previous entry in this blog.) They were no more likely to help than were others. So it’s doubtful that a law passed by some distant legislature would have had any impact on those people in the Wichita convenience store.

So Etzioni focuses instead on the symbolic function of the law.

Above all, laws have an expressive function. They are one way in which we state what our moral expectations are. They are of special value when, in a growing and complex society, it is unclear what we as a community consider right and wrong.

In other words, the law will make us feel better – it will confirm that our view of right and wrong is the official view. It won’t make us act better.

This is not to say that norms don’t change. “Midnight Cowboy” was originally rated X. (It's the only X-rated film ever to win the Oscar for best picture.) Yet it has almost no nudity, and little profanity (Ratso's “fuckin’ creeps” is the only time the “f-word” is heard), and the MPAA has since downgraded the X to an R, testimony that there has been a change in norms regarding the presentation of hustling, straight and gay.

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.