CHOOSING TO ACT

People in groups have a bad tendency not to take action to help others. In some cases, being in a group seems to keep people from acting in their own interest. That in a nutshell, Gentle Reader, has been the theme of this week's Goat Rope.

Previous posts this week have looked at real life incidents, such as the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, and at psychological experiments that also studied the issue in a less violent setting. Please check them out if this is your first visit.

So what are the conclusions of the research? Darley and Latane drew five conclusions from their experiments (both of which are discussed earlier this week) about helping behavior. As summarized in Lauren Slater's entertaining and informative book Opening Skinner's Box, they are:

1. You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occurring.
2. You must interpret the event as one in which help is needed.
3. You must assume personal responsibility.
4. You must decide what action to take.
5. You must take action.

Bystanders have great potential for good or evil. In his excellent study Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy F. Baumeister notes that

bystanders do not have to provide active support to the perpetrators of evil and violence. If they merely do nothing, and in particular if they fail to protest or object, than evil and violence are likely to spread.

He also notes that in many cases

the perpetrator might be sensitive to the moral judgements of bystanders. If bystanders say nothing, the perpetrator may believe that they did not see anything to criticize.

In a more positive way, he argues that

Bystanders do have a responsibility to protest evil, because it will grow unchecked if they do not. Whatever the press of one's own concerns or the appeal of minding one's own business, it is nonetheless true that the victims of evil and violence depend on bystanders to bear witness to what is happening and take a stand against it. It is the only way.

SPEAKING OF INSIGHTS FROM THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, here's a diverting mix from the Boston Globe.

MORE ON THE COST OF WAR. Here's former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz on the cost of the Iraq war. Short version: the big winners are oil companies and defense contractors. Who saw that coming?

SPEAKING OF THE WAR, a new poll shows that may Americans are confused about the human costs of that unnecessary war.

ECONOMY. The NY Times reports on a veritable witch's brew of bad economic news.

PRISON NATION/PRISON STATES. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows the drain caused by an exploding prison population on state budgets and investments in things like higher education.

COUNTING things is the theme of Jim Lewis' latest edition of Notes From Under the Fig Tree.

COMPARE YOUR LIST. From Campus Progress, here's a list of 99 problems with the Bush administration.

URGENT ANCIENT HOBBIT UPDATE here.

WV ROUNDUP. A confusing array of new state Medicaid rules has been challenged in court. The feds are investigating WV's supreme court Masseygate affair. Two sentences were handed down yesterday in the Megan Williams case.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

The theme this week at Goat Rope is the bystander effect and how and when people decide to intervene--or not. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

Psychological experiments as well as unfortunate events have suggested that there's something about being part of a larger group of people that makes us less likely to personally take action to help other people in a bad situation.

But it doesn't stop there--sometimes being part of a group makes us less likely to take action to help ourselves.

Researchers Darley and Latane (see yesterday's post) tested this in another ingenious experiment in which naive subjects were given a routine task in a room where smoke poured from the vents. When they were the only people in the room, most people (around 75 percent) reported the smoke.

But when they were in the room with two other people who expressed no concern about it (and were instructed as part of the experiment to ignore it), only ten percent reported it--even when the room was full of smoke at the end of the six minute experiment.

When they tried the experiment with three naive subjects in the room, i.e. nobody who was "in on it," people only reported the smoke 38 percent of the time.

It seems in general that we take their cues about the nature of a given situation from other people and if others don't seem to think it's a big deal, we're not likely to either--even if it could be a matter of our own life and death.

Time seems to be a factor in the decision to act as well. It seems that the longer people wait to take action, the less likely they are to do so.

Some days, El Cabrero is reminded of one of Dylan's darker lines: "We're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."

THE RECESSION AND THE WAR are the subjects of this op-ed by economist Dean Baker. Short version: it made things worse, but so did bad domestic policies and priorities.

EVANGELICALS ON THE MOVE. Here's an interesting article from The Nation about changing attitudes among evangelical voters. The religious right's lock on the group has been broken or at least challenged.

NEW BLOG FROM GOOD JOBS FIRST. GJF has long taken the lead in the fight for job quality standards, smart growth and accountability in economic development policies. The new blog, Clawback, is a welcome addition.

QUICK, ROBIN, GET THE SHARK REPELLENT! I did not make this up. According to a brief item in The Week Magazine, designers of the Shark Shield, a devise intended to keep sharks away by emitting electronic waves, may have to go back to the drawing board after a shark ate one of their units.

MORE ON CLIMATE CHANGE IN WV. Here's WV Public Radio on local responses to climate change (or the lack thereof).

RETIRING BABY BOOMERS might not signify the end of the world after all, this Foreign Policy article suggests.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

In the wake of the highly publicized killing of Kitty Genovese in Queens, in which news reports stated that a number of people witnessed without intervening, (see yesterday's post) two psychologists decided to study how people respond to the sufferings of others.

John Darley and Bibb Latane were obviously unwilling and unable to replicate that tragedy, but the did design an illuminating experiment that showed that people often take their cues about the seriousness of a situation from other people.

As Lauren Slater described the experiment in her entertaining book Opening Skinner's Box,

They recruited naive subjects at New Your University (NYU) to participate in what appeared to be a study of student adaptation to urban college life. A student sat in a separate room and spoke into a microphone for two minutes about the challenges at NYU. In a series of separate but audio-wired rooms were tape recorders carrying other student's stories, but the naive subject didn't know the voices were pre-recorded; the subject believed they were actual neighbors.

When one of the pre-recorded "students" who had previously self-identified as having severe epilepsy pretended to have a major seizure, the scientists observed how long it took for the subjects of the experiment to notify the experimenters that something was wrong. The pretended seizure lasted for a full six minutes.

Here's what they found. Subjects were likely to intervene when they believed that the only other person in the experiment was the person with the seizure. The rate was 85 percent.

But when they believed that four or more other people were listening as well, they were much less likely to intervene. The rate was 31 percent.

In other words, as Slater put it, "There is something about a crowd of bystanders that inhibits helping behavior." So much for the old "safety in numbers" theory. The term for this is "diffusion of responsibility," about which more tomorrow.

Another interesting finding was the time factor. Ninety five percent of those who intervened did so in the first three minutes of the apparent crisis. The longer people waited to intervene in a bad situation, the less likely they were to do so.

Does that sound familiar?

SPEAKING OF PSYCHOLOGY'S DARK SIDE, here's Wired interview with Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment and wrote the recent book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how Good People turn Evil.

TALKING SENSE. Here's conservative Ben Stein taking on the myth that tax cuts "pay for themselves."

$12 BILLION A MONTH AND A LOT OF DEAD AND INJURED PEOPLE. Must be the Iraq war we're talking about.

THEOCRATS NO MORE. This is an interesting article on the disillusionment with the religious right by some of its former leaders.

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN to know climate change is for real. In a welcome shift, Southern Baptists have taken a stronger stand on countering it. Here is the AP and NY Times on the subject.

A THEORY OF NAMES. Here's a good one on the effects of unusual names on children. Short version: they make for better self control. I guess Johnny Cash was on to something.

I DIDN'T NOTICE THIS, but WV small schools advocates won a round with a bill this session that limits school bus rides.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED