Page 72 - The Social Animal

54 The Social Animal

Defining the situation as an emergency is the first step; assum-
ing personal responsibility for intervening is the next. Onlookers are
more likely to help when they cannot reduce their sense of responsi-
bility by assuming others will act. I have described an experiment by
Darley and Latane demonstrating that people help more when they
think they are the only ones aware of an emergency. In Bickman’s ex-
periments, although the participants thought others were aware of
the situation, some were led to believe that the other participants
were unable to respond. Specifically, some of the female students
were informed that the other participants they would hear over the
intercom were located in nearby cubicles, while others were told that
one voice (turning out to be the victim’s) was originating from a
nearby cubicle but that the other participant was speaking from a dif-
ferent building. People responded significantly more speedily to the
emergency in the latter condition when perceiving that the other by-
stander was unable to help. In fact, the people who could not diffuse
their responsibility intervened as quickly as those who thought no-
body else heard the accident.
Although an event might be a clear emergency that demands
their aid, people help less when the costs of their assistance are high.
In a variation of the Piliavins’s subway experiments, the “victim”
55
sometimes bit a capsule of red dye as he collapsed, so that he ap-
peared to be bleeding from the mouth.Though the “blood” made the
emergency appear more serious, the bleeding victims were helped
less frequently than those who collapsed without bleeding. Appar-
ently, potential helpers were scared or repulsed by the blood, reduc-
ing their inclination to help. Other kinds of costs also can enter the
calculation, including seemingly trivial ones, as John Darley and
56
Daniel Batson cleverly illustrated. They enlisted divinity students
at Princeton Theological Seminary, ostensibly for the purpose of
recording a speech. Each student practiced his talk in one room; then
he was instructed to walk to another building, where his presentation
would be taped. At this point, some of the students were told they
were late for their appointment and were hurried out. Others were
told they were on time, and the rest that they had time to spare. On
their way to the recording session in the other building, the students
encountered an apparent victim slumped in a doorway, with head
down and eyes closed, coughing pathetically. More than half these
future ministers who were early or on time stopped to assist the vic-