Page 73 - The Social Animal

Conformity 55

tim, but only 10 percent of those who thought they were late for their
appointment offered help, even when the speech they were to deliver
involved the parable of the Good Samaritan!
In addition to assessing the costs of helping, people consider the
benefits their assistance will provide.There is a good deal of evidence
that people will help one another if they are certain they can do
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something truly useful. For example, in one experiment, Robert
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Baron showed that, when an individual was in obvious pain—and
when the bystander knew his or her response could alleviate the suf-
fering—then the greater the apparent pain, the more quickly the by-
stander responded. But when the bystander did not believe he or she
could reduce the victim’s pain, there was an inverse relationship be-
tween pain and speed of responding—that is, the greater the appar-
ent pain, the more slowly the bystander responded. To make sense
out of these results, we need to make use of the concept of empathy:
in this case, our tendency to experience unpleasant physiological re-
sponses at the sight of another person in pain. The greater the vic-
tim’s pain, the greater our unpleasant feeling. We can reduce this
unpleasant feeling either by helping the victim or by removing our-
selves psychologically from the situation. If there is clearly something
we can do about it, we act quickly—especially when the victim is in
great pain. If we believe there is nothing we can do about it, the
greater is our tendency to turn away from it (to reduce our own feel-
ings of unpleasantness), especially if the victim is in great pain.
Up to this point, we have been focusing on the considerations
surrounding a decision to help a victim. As this discussion of empa-
thy exemplifies, the bystander also considers the personal benefits
and costs of not helping. The discomfort aroused by seeing a victim’s
plight can be assuaged if the witness can redefine the incident as a
nonemergency or relinquish the responsibility for intervening. When
it is easy to remove oneself from the situation, helping is reduced.
Several factors, however, strengthen the connection the bystander
feels with the victim and thereby discourage leaving. We have all
heard anecdotes of people going to extraordinary lengths—entering
burning buildings or stepping in front of moving cars—to save mem-
bers of their family. We tend to feel more empathy and assume more
responsibility when the victim is someone close to us. The connec-
tion can be more superficial than family ties; for instance, potential
helpers render more assistance to those who exhibit attitudes similar