The Kitty Genovese incident in 1964 is as famous as it is shocking. 38 neighbours stood by as she was raped and murdered – stood by and did nothing, not even call the police. Research has been done to examine why this “bystander apathy” might happen, and reasons such as diffusion of responsibility have been given. What I think is more interesting is that research has also been done that hints at how to cure it.
I’ve been reading Lauren Slater’s “Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the 20th Century”, and it’s fascinating stuff. Latane and Darley performed a number of experiments concerning bystander apathy. Very briefly, put people alone in a situation where they could help and they are likely to help seven times out of ten. Put them in the same situation, where help still seems to be needed. but they are standing with a “passive confederate”, and they will only help seven times in a hundred. It’s a huge drop.
Now here’s how to cure it.
A not-very-famous social scientist called Arthur Beaman took a bunch of students and ran similar experiments. Half of the students went into the experiments as bystander apathy virgins, and half were shown films of the Darley and Latane experiments. Beaman then made the following 5 stages of helping behaviour explicit.
1. You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occuring.
2. You must interpret the event as one in which help is needed.
3. You must assume personal responsibility.
4. You must then decide what action to take.
5. You must then take action.
Students who saw the film, and knew the stages were nearly twice as likely to help than the bystander apathy virgins.
And so, I hope, by reading this, you’ll double your chances of being a good samaritan. And that really isn’t a bad thing.
I am going to toast Mr Arthur “Who?” Beaman and his equally anonymous friends in the pub tonight.
[Update: Beaman Reference is A. Beaman, P. Barnes, B. Klentz & B. Mcquirk, “Increasing Helping rates through information dissemination: Teaching Pays”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (1979) pp 406-11]