23.1: Case Studies

Riots and Mobs

When a crowd gets completely out of control, as it does in a violent riot or mob, it can do terrible damage. One of the most frightening things about mobs is that quite normal people can be swept up in them. How can people act in ways that are so out of character? We will see in this chapter that such situations can be very powerful. Somehow the situation leads many people to do things they wouldn’t have thought possible.

Helping: The Good Samaritan

The book of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible relates the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man traveling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed, beaten and left by the side of the road to die. Several people see him but pass on by. Then a Samaritan (a member of a group that was poorly regarded by the target audience of the story) comes upon him, helps, and saves the victim’s life.

In 1973, John Darley and Daniel Batson conducted a famous study at the Theological Seminary at Princeton University. The subjects were students at the Seminary, and when each arrived, they were told that they would be giving a lecture in another building on campus. Half were told that their talk should be about career alternatives for priests (this was meant to be a neutral topic); the other half were told that their talk should be about the parable of the Good Samaritan. Each group was then divided into three further subgroups that differed only in the instructions they received about how soon the talk was to be.

1. You are already late (high-hurry condition).
2. You should leave now (intermediate-hurry condition).
3. There is no rush (non-hurry condition).

So, we have six groups in all: two different topics for the talk, and three different hurry conditions.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Results of the Good-Samaritan Study

As the subjects made their way to the building where they were to give their talk, each of them passed a man slumped in a doorway. He was coughing, groaning and clearly in need of help. Which groups helped the most?

The topic of the talk didn’t make much difference. Furthermore, subjects who scored high on religiosity measures weren’t any more likely to help than those who scored low. In fact, the only factor that had much impact on whether a person helped or not was whether they were in a hurry: 63% of the subjects in the no hurry condition helped, 45% in the-intermediate hurry condition helped, and only 10% of those in the high-hurry condition helped (Figure 23.1.1). The personality or character traits of the subjects surely weren’t irrelevant to whether they stopped to give aid. But it was a feature of the situation—how rushed the people were—that played the greater role.

Helping: Kitty Genovese

At 3:20 A.M. on March 13, 1964, it was reported that Kitty Genovese arrived back at her apartment in Queens after a long night’s work. As she walked from her car to her building, she was accosted by a stranger who stabbed her repeatedly. Over and over she fell, was stabbed, struggled up, tried to crawl to her doorway, and was stabbed yet again. People in nearby apartments heard her screams, turned on their lights, and watched as the horrifying scene dragged on for almost thirty minutes. But what shocked the nation was that, according to the news report, at least 38 people watched the brutal murder and none of them called the police. Not one.

We now know that much of what we thought about the above story actually comes from profoundly bad reporting (several of the neighbors did call the police for instance), but at the time it led psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané to wonder about the conditions that would inhibit helping, and in 1969, they conducted an experiment to try to find out. There were three conditions in their experiment. In one condition, the subject was alone in the room, in the second, the subject was in a group with two other real subjects, and in the third, the subject was in a group with two other “subjects” who were actually confederates.

The experiment began normally enough. One or more subjects entered the room and began filling out a questionnaire. But suddenly smoke began coming out of a vent in the room; it certainly looked like something that could be dangerous. When the subjects were alone in the room, 78% of them reported the smoke. When there were three genuine subjects, 38% of the subjects reported it. And when there was one subject together with two confederates who did nothing, only 10% of the subjects reported it.

These results are typical. In 90% of the studies on the matter, a lone bystander is more likely to help than a person in a group. And many studies indicate that your chances of getting help may be best if only one other person around. Why is this—why don’t people help when we would expect them to?

Why Don’t People Help?

Why didn’t someone call the police as they watched Kitty Genovese’s brutal murder? Our first thought might be that they actually enjoyed watching her suffer. But surely all the people in her neighborhood couldn’t have been sadists. In fact, it turns out that when other people are present, people in general are more likely to stand by and do nothing. The situation inhibits helping. Psychologists often refer to the phenomena as the bystander effect.

In the previous chapter, we encountered the concept of social proof: people often wait to see what others do to determine the appropriate response. If everyone is waiting to see what behavior is appropriate, there may be no response at all. Put yourself in the position of a subject in the smoke study: Maybe the smoke pouring out of the vent is harmless; the other people in this room seem to think so, maybe they know more about such things than I do, and if I go for help I might end up looking like an idiot.

The lessons learned from the research that followed the Kitty Genovese murder is also a dramatic illustration of something else that is quite common: diffusion of responsibility. If you are the only one present and something needs to be done, you must do it if it is to be done at all. But if there are several people around, maybe someone else will act, and you’ll be off the hook. Diffusion of responsibility occurs when multiple people are present, and the responsibility diffuses or radiates throughout the group, so that no one feels particularly accountable. In situations like this, people are less likely to help. If you are willing to engage in some self-reflection you can probably remember countless times where you watched quietly while an injustice happened hoping someone else would speak up.

Prisoners and Guards

On Sunday morning, August 17, 1971, nine young men were picked up without warning at their homes by the Palo Alto police. They had been drawn from a group of about seventy men who had answered an advertisement in the local paper offering $15 to participants in a two-week study on prisons. After interviews and psychological screening, the group was narrowed to about twenty-five, and these people were randomly assigned to play the role of prisoner or guard.

The nine men arrested that Sunday morning were those who had been randomly assigned the role of prisoner. They were driven to the local Police Station, booked, fingerprinted, blindfolded, and taken to a simulated prison in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University. Meanwhile, those assigned the role of guards were given uniforms and instructed that their task was to maintain order (without using violence).

The subjects were part of a study on roles and behavior conducted by the Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his coworkers. After an initial rebellion by the prisoners, the guards quickly gained control, and soon stepped completely into their role as guards. They taunted, humiliated, and degraded the prisoners, making them do pushups or clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands when they didn’t obey. They began treating the prisoners like they weren’t real human beings. The prisoners also got into their role as prisoners, becoming listless, subservient, and suffering from stress (some had to be released early because they were cracking under the pressure). In fact, their reaction was so severe that the experiment had to be called off before the end of the first week.

The subjects were assigned randomly to play the role of prisoner or guard. But the situation felt so real, with uniforms, bars on the cells, and the other props of a real prison, that the subjects quickly adopted their roles all too well. In a very short time, normal people were transformed into sadistic guards or passive victims. Zimbardo and his coworkers had created a very powerful situation in which people fell into predetermined roles despite themselves. If six days in a setting that everyone knew was “just an experiment” had this effect, what effects might an even more powerful situation (like a real prison) have?

Brown Eyes vs. Blue Eyes

Even young children are not immune. Jane Elliott was a third-grade teacher in the small Iowa town of Riceville. Her students had little exposure to minority groups, so she decided to let them learn first-hand. One day, in the late 1960s, when her students arrived for class, Elliott informed them that brown-eyed children were smarter and better than blue-eyed children and so they should be treated better. The brown-eyed students were then given various privileges, while the blue-eyed students were subjected to demeaning rules that underscored their inferior, lowly status.

Well before the end of the day, the brown-eyed students were discriminating against their blue-eyed former friends: they fought with them, ostracized them, and suspected them of underhanded behavior. Meanwhile the blueeyed students became angry, demoralized, and withdrawn.

The next day Elliott told the students that she had made a mistake; it was in fact the blue-eyed children who were superior. The situation then replayed itself with the blue-eyed children engaging in ready and often hostile discrimination. The third day, the class discussed the implications of what they had been through. In 1992, before a huge television audience on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Elliott carried out the experiment, with similar results, using adults as subjects.