“Why,” asks Garfield, “do some people respond to these crises while others don’t?”
In the shadow of these crises, researchers have spent the past few decades trying to answer Garfield’s question. Their findings reveal a valuable story about human nature. Often, only subtle differences separate the bystanders from the morally courageous people of the world. Most of us, it seems, have the potential to fall into either category. It is the slight, seemingly insignificant details in a situation that can push us one way or the other.
Researchers have identified some of the invisible forces that restrain us from acting on our own moral instincts while also suggesting how we might fight back against these unseen inhibitors of altruism. Taken together, these results offer a scientific understanding for what spurs us to everyday altruism and a lifetime of activism, and what induces us to remain bystanders.
ALTRUISTIC INERTIA
Among the most infamous bystanders are 38 people in Queens, New York, who in 1964 witnessed the murder of one of their neighbors, a young woman named Kitty Genovese.
A serial killer attacked and stabbed Genovese late one night outside her apartment house, and these 38 neighbors later admitted to hearing her screams; at least 3 said they saw part of the attack take place. Yet no one intervened.
While the Genovese murder shocked the American public, it also moved several social psychologists to try to understand the behavior of people like Genovese’s neighbors.
One of those psychologists was John Darley, who was living in New York at the time. Ten days after the Genovese murder, Darley had lunch with another psychologist, Bibb Latané, and they discussed the incident.
“The newspaper explanations were focusing on the appalling personalities of those who saw the murder but didn’t intervene, saying they had been dehumanized by living in an urban environment,” says Darley, now a professor at Princeton University. “We wanted to see if we could explain the incident by drawing on the social psychological principles that we knew.”
A main goal of their research was to determine whether the presence of other people inhibits someone from intervening in an emergency, as had seemed to be the case in the Genovese murder. In one of their studies, college students sat in a cubicle and were instructed to talk with fellow students through an intercom. They were told that they would be speaking with one, two, or five other students, and only one person could use the intercom at a time.
There was actually only one other person in the study—a confederate (someone working with the researchers). Early in the study, the confederate mentioned that he sometimes suffered from seizures. The next time he spoke, he became increasingly loud and incoherent; he pretended to choke and gasp. Before falling silent, he stammered:
If someone could help me out it would it would er er s-s-sure be sure be good…because er there er er a cause I er I uh I’ve got a a one of the er sei-er-er things coming on and and and I could really er use some help…I’m gonna die er er I’m gonna die er help er er seizure er…
Eighty-five percent of the participants who were in the two-person situation—and hence believed they were the only witness to the victim’s seizure—left their cubicles to help. In contrast, only 62 percent of the participants who were in the three-person situation and 31 percent of the participants in the six-person situation tried to help.
Darley and Latané attributed their results to a “diffusion of responsibility”: when study participants thought there were other witnesses to the emergency, they felt less personal responsibility to intervene. Similarly, the witnesses of the Kitty Genovese murder may have seen other apartment lights go on or seen each other in the windows and assumed someone else would help. The end result is altruistic inertia. Other researchers have also suggested the effects of a “confusion of responsibility,” where bystanders fail to help someone in distress because they don’t want to be mistaken for the cause of that distress.
Darley and Latané also suspected that bystanders don’t intervene in an emergency because they’re misled by the reactions of the people around them. To test this hypothesis, they ran an experiment in which they asked participants to fill out questionnaires in a laboratory room. After the participants had gotten to work, smoke filtered into the room—a clear signal of danger.
When participants were alone, 75 percent of them left the room and reported the smoke to the experimenter. With three participants in the room, only 38 percent left to report the smoke. And quite remarkably, when a participant was joined by two confederates instructed not to show any concern, only 10 percent of the participants reported the smoke to the experimenter.
The passive bystanders in this study succumbed to what’s known as “pluralistic ignorance”—the tendency to mistake one another’s calm demeanor as a sign that no emergency is actually taking place. There are strong social norms that reinforce pluralistic ignorance. It is somewhat embarrassing, after all, to be the one who loses his cool when no danger actually exists. Such an effect was likely acting on the people who witnessed the Kitty Genovese incident; indeed, many said they didn’t realize what was going on beneath their windows and assumed it was a lover’s quarrel. That interpretation was reinforced by the fact that no one else was responding either.
A few years later, Darley ran a study with psychologist Daniel Batson that had seminary students at Princeton walk across campus to give a talk. Along the way, the students passed a study confederate, slumped over and groaning in a passageway. Their response depended largely on a single variable: whether or not they were late. Only 10 percent of the students stopped to help when they were in a hurry; more than six times as many helped when they had plenty of time before their talk.
Lateness, the presence of other people—these are some of the factors that can turn us all into bystanders in an emergency. Yet another important factor is the characteristics of the victim. Research has shown that people are more likely to help those they perceive to be similar to themselves, including others from their own racial or ethnic group. In general, women tend to receive more help than men. But this varies according to appearance: more attractive and femininely dressed women tend to receive more help from passersby, perhaps because they fit the gender stereotype of the vulnerable female.
We don’t like to discover that our propensity for altruism can depend on prejudice or the details of a particular situation—details that seem beyond our control. But these scientific findings force us to consider how we’d perform under pressure; they reveal that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors might have been just like us. Even more frightening, it becomes easier to understand how good people in Rwanda or Nazi Germany remained silent against the horrors around them. Afraid, confused, coerced, or willfully unaware, they could convince themselves that it wasn’t their responsibility to intervene.
But still, some did assume this responsibility and this is the other half of the bystander story. Some researchers refer to the “active bystander,” that person who witnesses an emergency, recognizes it as such, and takes it upon herself to do something about it.
Who are these people? Are they inspired to action because they receive strong cues in a situation indicating it’s an emergency? Or is there a particular set of characteristics—a personality type—that makes some people more likely to be active bystanders while others remain passive?
WHY PEOPLE HELP
A leader in the study of the differences between active and passive bystanders is psychologist Ervin Staub, whose research interests were shaped by his experiences as a young Jewish child in Hungary during World War II.