Page 68 - The Social Animal

50 The Social Animal

around a “lady in distress.” In this experiment, a female experimenter
asked college students to fill out a questionnaire. The experimenter
then retired to the next room through an unlocked collapsible curtain,
saying she would return when they finished the questionnaire. A few
minutes later, she staged an “accident.” What the students actually
heard was the sound (from a hidden tape recording) of the young
woman climbing a chair, followed by a loud scream and a crash, as if
the chair had collapsed and she had fallen to the floor. They then
heard moaning and crying and the anguished statement, “Oh, my
God, my foot, I . . . I can’t move it. Oh . . . my ankle . . . I can’t
get this thing off me.” The cries continued for about a minute and
gradually subsided.
The experimenters were interested in determining whether the
participants would come to the young woman’s aid. The important
variable in the experiment was whether the people were alone in the
room. Of those who were alone, 70 percent offered to help the young
woman; of those who were participating in pairs with strangers, only
20 percent offered help. Thus, it is clear that the presence of another
bystander tends to inhibit action. This phenomenon has been
dubbed the bystander effect. When interviewed subsequently, the
unhelpful participants who had been in the room with another per-
son said they had concluded that the accident probably wasn’t seri-
ous, at least in part because of the inactivity of their partner.
In the Genovese murder, there was probably an additional rea-
son the bystanders did not help. In such a situation it may be that,
if people are aware that an event is being witnessed by others, the
responsibility felt by any individual is diffused. Each witness to the
Genovese slaying who noticed lights flick on and faces watching in
several other windows might have felt no personal responsibility to
act. Since others were watching, each bystander could have con-
cluded that someone else was calling the police or that it was some-
one else’s duty to do so. To test this idea, Darley and Latane 52
arranged an experimental situation in which people were placed in
separate rooms but were able to communicate with each other by
microphones and earphones. Thus, the participants could hear one
another but couldn’t see one another. The investigators then staged
a simulated epileptic attack: They played a tape recording of a sup-
posed epileptic seizure on the part of one of the participants. In one
experimental condition, each person was led to believe that he or