Page 70 - The Social Animal

52 The Social Animal

small degree in the situations previously discussed. One of these fac-
tors is reflected in my use, in the preceding paragraph, of the term “my
fellow campers.” Specifically, a feeling of “common fate” or mutuality
may be engendered among people sharing the same interests, pleas-
ures, hardships, and environmental conditions of a closed environment
like a campground, a feeling of mutuality that is stronger than among
people who are merely residents of the same country, county, or city. A
second, somewhat related factor is that there was no escape from the
face-to-face aspect of the situation: The onlookers in the Genovese
case could walk away from their windows into the relative protection
and isolation of their own homes; the people on Fifth Avenue could
walk past the woman lying on the sidewalk and keep on going, right
out of her environment; the participants in the Darley-Latane exper-
iments were not in a face-to-face relationship with the victim, and they
knew they could escape from the environment in a very short time. In
the campground,the events were occurring in a relatively restricted en-
vironment; the campers were going to have to face squarely the next
morning whatever they allowed to happen that night. It seems that,
under these circumstances, individuals are more willing to take respon-
sibility for each other.
Of course, this is mere speculation. The behavior of the campers
at Yosemite, while provocative, is not conclusive because it was not
part of a controlled experiment. One of the major problems with ob-
servational data like these is that the observer has no control over
who the people in the situation are. Thus, differences between peo-
ple always loom as a possible explanation for the differences in their
behavior. For example, one might argue that individuals who go
camping are—by nature or experience—kinder, gentler, more
thoughtful, and more humane than New Yorkers. Perhaps they were
Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts as children—hence their interest in
camping—and, in scouting, they were taught to be helpful to other
people. One of the reasons for doing experiments is to control this
kind of uncertainty. Indeed, a subsequent experiment lends support
to my speculation about my campground experience.This was an ex-
53
periment performed by Irving Piliavin and his associates in one of
the cars of a train in the New York City subway system. In this ex-
periment, an accomplice of the experimenters staggered and col-
lapsed in the presence of several individuals riding the subway. The
“victim” remained stretched out on the floor of the train, staring at