DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY

The theme this week at Goat Rope is a look at what psychology can tell us about the dark side of human nature (you will also find links and comments about current events). Monday's post was about the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, which became a legendary example of the failure of people to intervene to help someone in trouble.

As the story was widely reported, over 30 people witnessed more than one attack on Genovese, yet no one intervened. Subsequent investigations have called some of the details into question, but clearly things like this happen all too often.

Yesterday's post was about a famous psychological experiment by Darley and Latane which tried to recreate a similar situation and got similar results. The bottom line is that there is something about groups which seems to inhibit individual helping action.

This is something that most of us have experienced in one way or another. If your car breaks down, you are probably more likely to get help on a little traveled country road than on I 95 at rush hour.

The term for this is "diffusion of responsibility." As Lauren Slater wrote in Opening Skinner's Box,.

The more people witnessing an event, the less responsible any one individual feels and, indeed, is, because responsibility is evenly distributed among the crowd. Diffusion of responsibility is further compounded by social etiquette so strong it overrides even life-and-death situations; it would be terrible, after all, to be the only one to make a fuss, and perhaps for nothing as well. Who is to say what's a real and what's a false emergency.

The fact that we often doubt ourselves doesn't help much either in this arena.

But a further experiment by Darley and Latane shows that the presence of others can even keep people from acting in their own interest. More on that tomorrow.

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE? Having it both ways is increasingly unlikely. Here's a good item from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

LABOR AND CLIMATE CHANGE. Here's yet another item on how unions are getting more engaged in the climate change issue. Speaking of which, WV legislators were recently urged to come up with a climate plan.

VIRTUES AND INTERESTS. This article summarizes some interesting cross cultural results from experiments about cooperation and self interest.

URGENT HOBBIT UPDATE here.

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

FROM REAL LIFE TO EXPERIMENTS AND BACK AGAIN

Every once in a while, El Cabrero teaches an off campus sociology class. When we discuss methods of conducting research, I always try to emphasize that there are a lot of valid and interesting ways of doing it.

The method of conducting experiments is a mainstay of psychology but is less common in sociology. The value of experiments is that they are done in a tightly controlled manner, which is also their drawback, since everyday life is pretty messy. Still, some truly ingenious experiments have shed light on many aspects of social life.

Some of the most interesting have been inspired by real life situations. Some examples of this are Stanley Milgram's classic if controversial experiments on obedience to authority and Solomon Asch's studies of conformity. (Search this blog for posts on these topics.)

One horrific situation that prompted some enlightening experiments was the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York. As most people heard the story, more than 30 people saw or overheard the attack, which was repeated three times for more than 30 minutes. Yet it was widely reported that no one intervened or called the police until it was too late.

The event was sensationalized in the media. The headline in the New York Times at the time was "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police" and this was the opening line:

For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Recent investigations of available data have suggested that it wasn't quite that clear cut. As USA Today reported a while back,

As it turned out, there were two attacks, not three. The prosecutor in the case later said only a half-dozen witnesses were ever found. Others have suggested that calls to the police were made (and ignored), and that the fatal second assault occurred in a location visible to almost no one.

Some who have investigated the details suggest the tragedy as it is generally recounted has become something of a parable of the Bad Samaritan and that the story has taken on a life of its own. Still, it is undeniable that people often fail to intervene when terrible things happen.

More on this and the research it inspired tomorrow.

HAPPINESS AND THE ECONOMY is the subject of this interesting NY Times piece. As you may have guessed, the economy today isn't conducive to a whole lot of it and research suggests that economic growth alone is not a valid measure of well being, especially in a time of rising inequality.

SPEAKING OF AN UNHAPPY ECONOMY, the recent drop in nationwide job numbers doesn't bode well.

MORE ON "THE SURGE IS WORKING" dogma can be found in this Gazette-Mail editorial.

IF IT DOESN'T ROT, DON'T EAT IT is the advice of author Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. I don't think he meant that you have to wait till it does, however.

BIG RED TRUCK. Here is an op-ed by yours truly on my short and inglorious career as a volunteer fire fighter.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED