Page 71 - The Social Animal

Conformity 53

the ceiling.This scene was repeated 103 times under a variety of con-
ditions. The most striking result was that, a large part of the time,
people spontaneously rushed to the aid of the “stricken” individual.
This was especially true when the victim was made to seem obviously
ill; in more than 95 percent of the trials, someone offered help im-
mediately. Even when the “victim” had been given a liquor bottle to
carry and was made to reek of alcohol, he received immediate help
from someone on 50 percent of the trials. Unlike the behavior of the
participants that Darley and Latane dealt with, the helping behavior
of the people on the subway train was not affected by the number of
bystanders. People helped just as often and just as speedily on
crowded trains (where there could be a diffusion of responsibility) as
they did on virtually empty trains. Although the people doing the
helping were New Yorkers (as in the Genovese case, the Fifth Av-
enue case, and the Darley-Latane experiments), they were also in an
environment that, although very much unlike Yosemite National
Park, did have two things in common with the campground: (1) peo-
ple riding on the same subway car do have the feeling of sharing a
common fate, and (2) they were in a face-to-face situation with the
victim from which there was no immediate escape.
How can the tendency to help be increased? Consider the ques-
tions that would run through your mind should you confront a pos-
sible emergency: Is the situation really serious? Does it require my
personal intervention? Will helping be difficult or costly for me?
Will my help benefit the victim? Can I easily leave? Your response
will depend on your answers to each of these questions.
The first prerequisite for helping is to define the situation as an
emergency. We have seen that the clues provided by the presence of
unresponsive bystanders can discourage other onlookers from con-
cluding that an emergency exists. But the interpretations of by-
standers can also influence perceptions in the opposite direction. In
an experiment conducted by Leonard Bickman, female students
54
sitting in cubicles and listening over intercoms heard a crash and a
victim’s scream, followed by the reaction of a witness to the apparent
accident. When the participants heard the witness interpret the
event as a certain emergency, they helped more frequently and more
quickly than when the interpretation was uncertain or when the
event was labeled a nonemergency. The less ambiguous the emer-
gency, the greater the likelihood of helping.