It’s 3 am, there’s someone screaming in your dream. As you push up through the sticky morass of your slumber, you slowly realize there’s someone screaming in real life, outside your window. There’s a woman yelling at a car. Is she hurt? Drunk? Tweaking? Mentally ill? What are you supposed to do?
When we ran a letter from the woman this happened to last week (Ruckus), a conversation ensued in the comments about what she should have done, which reminded me of Kitty Genovese.
The details of Kitty Genovese’s murder in 1964 are gruesome and disturbing, we won’t repeat them here (see the Wikipedia article for a full retelling). The short of it, though, was that she was attacked and killed just outside of her apartment building in Queens, New York. The attack that killed her lasted almost half an hour, during which time the killer left and returned. Throughout the attack, a dozen of her neighbors watched from windows oriented around the entrance and did nothing.
It seems monstrous and uncaring, the kind of insensitivity that might happen in a big, anonymizing city, but not in smalltown, lefty Wallingford.
Experiments done later that decade by the psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané suggest otherwise. In a series of clever tests into the “bystander effect”, they explored what influences our tendency to take action in situations like this.
In one, for example, they fed smoke under the doorway of a room in which the subjects in their experiment were taking a test, to see whether they got up to alert someone. One strong influence on the subjects’ behavior was the presence of others in the room. If there the subject was along, there was a 75% chance he or she would alert the authorities. However, if there were three subjects in the room together, only 38% of them would do anything. Were they taking cues from each other (“he’s not doing anything, so it must not be serious”) or was there some diffusion of responsibility (“if not doing anything is wrong, at least I won’t take the blame alone”)?
In a more striking experiment, Darley and Batson asked their subjects to report to a building on the other side of campus. On the path to the subjects had to cross, a confederate was lying prone on the sidewalk (hurt? drunk?). To ensure the subjects were given a “fair chance”, the body was positioned so they would actually have to step over or around the confederate.
In a double twist that could only be called poetic, the subjects were no ordinary college students, they were seminary students, and the reason they were asked to cross campus was to give a talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a story highlighting the importance of stopping to help strangers in need. Amazingly, even these subjects often did not stop to help (63% who were not “hurried” offered some help, while only 10% who were set up to be “running late” stopped).
So does this mean that we’re all insensitive, uncaring brutes? No, obviously not. Instead, what the literature suggests is that we’re all trying to figure out what the “right” thing to do is on the fly, and there are a variety of influences on what decision we make. What are other people doing? How easy is it to help? What are the dangers of helping? Are we even sure that someone needs help, or that if we do offer to help, it will be effective? In the flash of a moment, we’re making the best decisions we can with the information we have.
That said, I find that knowing about these experiments and knowing about our natural tendency to act less when there are others there to share the responsibility with helps me personally to act more. I can think of a half dozen times at least where I have wondered whether I should help, the names Darley and Latane flashed through my head, and I acted.
How about you? Have you helped someone or wished you had? What would you do if you saw a drunk street person wobbling down your street, clearly out of control?
If you read the article on Kitty Genovese’s murder, you will find that the common story of the neighbors doing nothing is inaccurate.
@Michael and David, the main part of the original report that was inaccurate was the number of people that were witnesses. It does seem that one person called, but the fact remains that a dozen others did not. The core point remains, if the details are disputed.
Just a little factoid, Wallingford has a population density of over 8k people per square mile. That’s hardly smalltown – and is rather anonymizing. Our levels of robbery, burglary, and property crime are all at least twice as high as national averages.
Going with Dunbar’s number, that means most of us maintain a social relationship with just a sliver of those who live around us.
Thus most people around us are strangers – and it’s completely reasonable that most of us will not take the risk of doing much more than reporting an incident to police if the person in need is not in our social circle.
Apathy has never ceased to amaze me each and every time I experience it. As someone who has pulled over immediately upon seeing an old man faint on the sidewalk or stopped to try and offer assistance to a car accident, I wondered whether it was just the old Seattle passive/aggressive mentality. But as it turns out, this passive attitude seems to be more the norm.
Interestingly, I’ve also discovered that there are leaders and there are followers. More often than not, when someone actually steps forward to help, only then will the sheeple generally follow.
Best recent case in point: That blazing car accident over on 15th late last year when Rizzo came running out of his now-closed French Dip Restaurant to pull a little girl out of the burning car with a full audience of idiots standing on both sides of the street. Watching. Perhaps if someone else had also stepped in, the little girl’s Father might also have been saved from burning in the car. While I appreciate the protection of the Good Samaritan Act to prevent evil lawyers from attempting to sue good people who try to help others, perhaps our society may want to consider laws that would charge those who do absolutely nothing, especially when even a little help would go a long way.
I typically call 911 as soon as I see an accident on the highway or street and I’d say that 9 times out of 10, the operator will tell me, “No sir. No one else has called it in yet” when asked. Most people seem to want to wait because they think someone else will step in and do something. I guess it’s the path of least resistance as a way of life.
Here’s a provocative thought: Perhaps mindsets might change one day when a vulturous lawyer actually tries to sue people in a crowd for doing nothing.
Ditto Michael on comment #1. I read in Freakonomics that the single article which started a huge nationwide discussion was actually grossly inaccurate. The scenario commonly invoked didn’t really happen.
I don’t know. I don’t think it would be healthy to try to force people to intervene if they felt uncomfortable or incompetent or frightened. Compassion and courage can’t be legislated of course, and as the world increases in numbers and complexity and anonymity, people become wary of getting involved or getting duped. And sometimes, good intentions just plain go awry:
One Sunday, some fifty-five years ago, after dropping off our fundamentalist grandmother at the Fisher Studio Building in downtown Seattle where she lived and worked, we were driving back home to West Seattle along First Ave. It was raining hard and my brother and I were gawking out the windows at the assortment of “bums” and characters in Pioneer Square when we spotted someone sprawled on the curb. Dad, the tale of the Good Samaritan fresh on his mind after church that morning, pulled the car over and stopped. Mom and we kids watched the unfolding events.
Dad walked briskly back to the sprawled man, his shoes tap tap tapping on the wet pavement. Just as he reached the fellow, he slipped and fell with a heavy “thud” on top of the man, who emitted a quiet “ouff”. A woman who was teetering nearby, clutching a bag clinking with several bottles, staggered over and peered down at my dad. “Whaadcha do thaat foor?” she slurred, and then fell down on my dad. With three people now bunched together on the curb, another Samaritan slowed his car and rolled down his window: “Uh, do you need some help?” My dad, by now on his knees, said “Yes please!” and the fellow stopped his car and got out.
My dad tried to explain what happened while he and the new fellow got the unsteady and bleary-eyed man and woman to their feet. Thanking the fellow profusely for helping, he opened the fellow’s back car door, assisted the two inebriates inside, shook hands with the new fellow (who by now was looking a little dazed and confused himself), and said something over his shoulder that the two in his back seat “might need some kind of medical attention” as he walked quickly back to our car and got in. We waved as the fellow drove past us with his new passengers. Their return waves were all a little on the weak side. We always wondered where they ended up.
I would have called 911. I have a sad thought the woman was way past inebriated and could nto ffind her car. At that hour.. people need to sleep.
A year ago where I lived at 2 am a neighbor and a woman had a huge screaming fight (drunk) and were trying to get into his locked apartment which included climbing onto balconies. As I began to call landlord I heard another neighbor approach them and offer them her back to climb up on.I stopped my call and went out(now that another was involved I felt safer to approach them). They got someone onto the balcony and into the apt. The next day my neighbors did NOT want the landlord called or this reported to them. i acquiesced. I wish I had just called. 5 apartments of people, maybe more, were awakened in a strictly quiet building and very drunk people were climbing on furniture in the dark and rain to a high balcony.
I am happy to report my recent experience that shows that Wallingford folks do take action. I was driving on 46th and saw a man laying on the sidewalk (which was patched with ice and snow). I stopped, went to check on him and when he didn’t answer I pulled out my cell phone and called 911. The person who answered said I was the 5th one to call, but there was nothing they could do since he had refused care. By the time I left he was up and stumbling. Though I wasn’t happy he refused care, I was glad to know that others had stopped to check on him.
While driving down 37th a couple of years ago, I spotted a woman lying face-down on the grassy strip beside the sidewalk. I immediately screeched to a halt, jumped out of my car and ran to the woman asking if she was ok. She lazily lifted her head and I realized that she was sun bathing. I felt pretty silly but was still glad that I stopped. I think it’s always better to err on the side of caution in these instances. Check on your neighbors, folks!
With budget cuts to social services, I think this is going to be more and more of a problem in our neighborhood. Our street in particular has a fast-multiplying population of transients sleeping and carousing on the sidewalks. When the weather is bad, they hang out in the 50th Street laundry. I wish they weren’t there, but don’t know where else they would go. This is a (relatively) harmless population (mostly just really drunk and annoying ALL THE FRIGGIN TIME). I have gotten so used to seeing them sleep on the sidewalks and at the 7-11 that I would never even consider bothering the police about it. I only call if they are sleeping on someone’s porch or driveway.
When I was on a night-time bike ride in a very small town in Northern California, I witnessed a car careen off a frontage road into a ditch full of trees. I pedaled over and made my way down through the thicket to the car, now upside down. I noticed a child of about ten first and pulled him out. He was uninjured and I sent him up to wait on the road. Then I pulled out the very overweight driver, who was extremely drunk and crying. The stench of liquor was unusually intense. I ended up half carrying and half dragging her up to the road. She barely made any sense, but I realized she wanted her shoes. I went down and got them and then sent the kid down the road to get the woman’s husband or boyfriend. He was also very drunk. Apparently they had just had a drunken argument and she had sped off with her kid in tow and promptly lost control on a curve.
I did not own a cellphone at the time, so I had to pedal a couple miles to the nearest gas station to call the police from a pay phone. Since I had left the scene and could not verify weather or not the drunk driving woman was still at the scene, they declined to take any action whatsoever. I have no idea what happened to the woman or her child.
If Darley and Latané or Darley and Batson had tested children, the results would have been quite different, I think.
When I was about 7 years old I took the El train back and forth from school sometimes alone. I remember in the dead of Winter once, I saw ahead of me, a man on the ground.
I went to him and tried to help him up…he was barely breathing and I noticed with first alarm and then despair, that he was partially frozen to the ground. I tried with all of my might to pry the ice which had somehow formed over his arm, off of it. When I couldn’t get the ice off of him, I started crying really really hard, about the world I lived in, where a man could freeze to the ground and couldn’t be pried up by someone who cared, no matter how much she cared.
A man in a long black overcoat and business suit stopped to ask me why I was crying and I pointed to the man’s arm, frozen to the ground. The man exclaimed something like ‘oh my god!’ I don’t remember the exact thing he said. Then he told me to go home, that he was an adult and he would help the man and this wasn’t my responsibility and he set about trying to pry the man’s arm off of the ground himself. I remember feeling enormous relief that another person cared both about me and about this man in grave danger.
My responses to public trauma haven’t receded in adulthood. If I see or hear someone in trouble, I feel responsible, regardless of how many people may be in the vicinity. This is not because I have more compassion than anyone else and it is not because I am a leader. It is not courage that motivates me to stand in between people when they are punching each other in the street–I am just as afraid of getting hurt as anyone else is, i think. It is not religion or moral stories about being a good person which have influenced me to pull animals who have been hit by cars out of the road or to follow situations where semi-conscious women are being carried down the street. I believe that most people would be this way if they had not been socialized otherwise. It is my impression that our very biology asks it of us and that many people have been taught to ignore our most basic instincts in favor of perpetuating a disembodied and abstract economy.
Those moments of doubt that something is happening which requires our presence and our care or that we even have agency with which to offer help are learned behaviors in my opinion, not human nature. If we didn’t have presence, care or agency then the question of whether or not we should do something wouldn’t even arise. The answer ‘no’ to the question of our own capacity to care for each other is not a character flaw or a personal loss deserving chastisement, I see it as the mark that our culture is generally disconnected from the nature of our physical world and divided from the sources of our sustenance(our relationships). I don’t think anyone should be blamed for these losses, nor do I think that anyone should feel righteous about arriving in a moment with enough internal resources to actually benefit someone.
I am grateful to that man who helped the man frozen to the ground because he helped me too. He helped me to realize that people aren’t uncaring, they just need to be reminded of what is really true about them. He saw, in my childish caring, I think, his own ability to care. He also showed me a way that I didn’t want to die as I became an adult–he gave me a model for an adult who cared enough to help. It is painful to intervene in difficult situations, because difficult situations are…well…difficult and usually painful. Yet despite the pain of these interventions, I am grateful for the level of aliveness that I am able to feel and the level of responsibility that I have towards the other living beings with whom I inhabit this world. I feel that I’m very fortunate and can only wish the same difficult and painful good fortune for everyone.
By the way: that is an amazing photo. I really love it beyond reason.