Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [275]
They talked about it for hours that night and had a joint flash of inspiration. As Latané recalls:
The newspapers, TV, everybody, was carrying on about the fact that thirty-eight people witnessed the crime and nobody did anything, as if that were far harder to understand than if one or two had witnessed it and done nothing. And we suddenly had an insight: maybe it was the very fact that there were thirty-eight that accounted for their inactivity. It’s an old trick in social psychology to turn a phenomenon around and see if what you thought was the effect was actually the cause. Maybe each of the thirty-eight knew that a lot of other people were watching—and that was why they did nothing.37
Late though it was, the two immediately began designing an experiment to test their hypothesis. Many weeks later, after much planning and preparation, they launched an extended investigation of the responses of bystanders, under varied circumstances, to an emergency.
In the study, seventy-two NYU students in introductory psychology courses took part in an unspecified experiment in order to fulfill a class requirement. Each arriving participant was told by Darley, Latané, or a research assistant that the experiment involved a discussion of the personal problems of urban university students. The session was to be conducted in two-person, three-person, or six-person groups. To minimize embarrassment when revealing personal matters, they would be in separate cubicles and would communicate over an intercom system, taking turns and talking in an arranged sequence.
Whether the naïve participant was supposedly talking to only one other person or to two or five others—supposedly, because in fact everything he heard others say was a tape-recorded script—the first voice was always that of a male student who told of difficulty adjusting to life in New York and to his studies, and confided that under stress he was prone to epileptic seizures. The voice was that of Richard Nisbett, then a graduate student at Columbia University and today a professor at the University of Michigan, who in tryouts had proved the best actor. The second time it was his turn to talk, he started to sound disordered and incoherent; he stammered and panted, said that he had “one of these things coming on,” started choking and pleading for help, gasped, “I’m gonna die—er-er—help—er-er—seizure-er,” and, after more choking sounds, fell silent.
Of the participants who thought that they and the epileptic were the only ones talking to each other, 85 percent popped out of their cubicles to report the attack even before the victim fell silent; of those who thought four other people were also hearing the attack, only 31 percent did so. Later, when the students were asked whether the presence of others had influenced their response, they said no; they had been genuinely unaware of its powerful effect on them.
Darley and Latané now had a convincing sociopsychological explanation of the Kew Gardens phenomenon, which they called “the social inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies,” or, more simply, “the bystander effect.” As they had hypothesized, it was the presence of other witnesses to an emergency that made for passivity in a bystander. The explanation of the bystander effect, they said, “may lie more in the bystander’s response to other observers than in presumed personality deficiencies of ‘apathetic’ individuals.”38
They suggested later that three processes