Page 74 - The Social Animal

56 The Social Animal

to their own. In 1971, as protesters demonstrated in Washington
against President Nixon’s Vietnam policy, Peter Suedfeld and his col-
59
leagues staged an experiment to test the relationship between sim-
ilarity of attitudes and willingness to help. They trained a young
woman to approach individual demonstrators with a request to help
her male friend, who was ill. Her ailing friend carried a sign reading
either “Dump Nixon” or “Support Nixon.” Demonstrators offered
more assistance to a fellow protester carrying the anti-Nixon placard
than to a seeming supporter of Nixon. Finally, as I mentioned when
discussing the Yosemite camping incident and the subway experi-
ments, helping is more likely when people share a sense of common
fate. This sense of interdependence is easily disregarded in our soci-
ety; the predominant explanation given by the 38 onlookers to the
Genovese murder was “I didn’t want to get involved.”

A Note on the Ethics of Experiments

In their quest for knowledge, experimental social psychologists occa-
sionally subject people to some fairly intense experiences. In this
chapter alone, I have discussed experiments in which people have
been led into conflict between the evidence of their own eyes and the
unanimous judgments of other people, in which they have been or-
dered to deliver intense electric shock to an apparently suffering vic-
tim, and in which scores of innocent people riding a subway have
been forced to witness the apparent agony of a person in distress.
These procedures raise serious ethical problems. A more com-
plete treatment of ethics is presented in Chapter 9; here, let it suffice
to make two general points: First, it is the responsibility of all exper-
imenters in this field to protect the experimental participant from all
harm. The experimenter must take steps to ensure that participants
leave the experimental situation in a frame of mind that is at least as
sound as it was when they entered the experimental situation. This
frequently requires postexperimental “debriefing” procedures that
require more time and effort than the main body of the experiment.
Given the ethical thin ice that experimenters must skate upon,
why bother with these kinds of experiments at all? This brings me to
the second point of ethics I want to emphasize at this time: For so-
cial psychologists, the ethical issue is not a one-sided affair. In a real