What makes a person a Good Samaritan against a person unwilling to help? What constrains and what allows a heroic response? Humans are naturally social beings, we’ve adapted that way for survival as appose to our cousins the Neanderthals who were made extinct without the protection and help of a large communal group. So why is it that we don’t always help when we see others in trouble? This essay will be looking to better understand the factors both internal and external that affect our behaviour and decision making when presented with someone in need of help. It will hopefully reach a better understanding of our natures and see if it’s dependent on the type of person we are or if it’s out of our control whether we help or not. I want to also know what can possibly be done to make us all closer to being the Good Samaritan. ‘The Bystander effect’, a social psychological phenomenon in which a victim is left unaided by surrounding people due to others simply being present inhibiting them, the likelihood of help decreases as the amount of people surrounding increases. The term ‘Bystander effect’ was coined in 1968, four years after the murder case of Kitty Genovese that inspired it. Kitty was stabbed and raped on the New York streets whilst her surrounding neighbours from the apartments above were seen as doing nothing to help (fig 1). Though the media inaccurately blamed all the tenants with headlines such as "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police" most did not witness nor hear the whole event, some misread the situation either as a lovers dispute or as drunken bravado. However it sparked the American public’s attention, leading a pathway to the many experiments by John Darley and Bibb Latané in which they studied individual and group behaviour in staged emergency situations, measuring the time it takes for the subjects to intervene if at all. One experiment in particular had a woman acting in distress, 70 percent of the lone individuals made some effort to help, but when others were present in the room only 40 percent of test subjects helped. Gradually it became clearer the large number of variables that can occur for this effect to take place. Factors such as ‘diffusion of responsibility’, where individuals tend to not take responsibility as a shared belief that someone else will help develops, but when one individual changes this unspoken rule by stepping out to help, others are shown usually to follow. Ambiguity (or Pluralistic Ignorance) plays a role in certain situations where a bystander will be left unsure whether a person requires help and may not want to risk the embarrassment or even the criminality (such as having to break a door down) of being wrong. The cohesiveness between bystander’s affects the likelihood as well, where a group of well acquainted people will be more likely to help faster together than a group of strangers would. From a personal viewpoint I’ve managed to see a form of the bystander effect take place that inspired this essay to be written. Sat on a train a couple entered, the male was aggressive and threatening not only to his partner but also to anyone staring such as nearby children, my fellow passengers and I remained quiet with heads lowered. One person finally chose to act, grabbing the man and proceeding to throw him off the train, this burst the silent bubble and people began to talk. One woman even told the abused lady to be ashamed of being in that kind of relationship. The abuser was shown to be scared and ran back begging for his partner to follow. That one gentleman who had chosen to stand up had changed the whole scenario, whilst everyone else had done nothing. There are many factors from just this one scenario to explore that could of caused him to act, certain qualities in his personality, possible past experiences, possibly as a display of masculinity towards companions, he may have been egged on to do it with peer pressure as a factor or was it
possibly doing ‘good’ for the sake of being good. External factors such as the closed conditions of the train may have also affected the situation, the man acted when the train reached a stop so was able to remove the problem, but if the stop had been further would the abuser have been allowed to carry on further. Also it has to be questioned if this event had positive repercussions would the abuser later focus his revenge onto his partner, leading me to further question how much commitment you should have to stop a bully permanently, the police may have needed to be involved.
Throughout literature there are plenty of examples of the consequences of not helping one another and the heroism of people who do, the parable of the Good Samaritan, being one of the first and most famous examples, a tale in which a victim of a mugging is left bleeding, ignored by all others the man’s enemy the Samaritan helps him back to health. It’s famous for its message of turning the other cheek and letting no prejudice stop from ending human suffering. There’s the modern classics such as ‘An Inspector calls’, it has a strong socialist commentary on how we are all part of a larger community and that our actions always affect the lives of others. Television shows such as crime watch exhibit those people both willing to help and others not wanting to get involved. There have now been various shows examining this herd mentality, the flashy American TV series ‘What would you do?’ in particular where they test the general public’s reactions to acted out scenes of theft, racism, homophobia and such like. Though highly unscientific it does show some interesting outcomes and proves people reach a limit before they feel it’s necessary to get involved, of course this can only be a commentary on American society, and does not represent a global response. An example of just one person massively changing everything by standing out against the crowd occurred in Romania; Tyrannical President Ceausescu ran a corrupt regime for many years. With trouble starting to brim the president gathered the media and his citizens to deliver a speech. Nico Leon, a tired citizen of the regime alone in the crowd, began to voice his support for the revolutionaries in Timisoara, the crowd around him misunderstood his words believing he was shouting in support of Timisoara itself, that was until Nico began to call ‘down with Ceausescu’, the crowd began to panic, pushing away as far as possible from Nico. From Ceausescu’s view the crowd appeared to be breaking into revolt right in front of him, he froze in front of the cameras, mouth opening and shutting. Things only got worse for him when his security was heard over the microphone whispering ‘they’re getting in’, this was broadcast to the whole country. This began a whole revolution and Ceausescu was dead within a week. (1) On a grander scale we see every day how the richer and more powerful countries behave towards the poorer nations, deciding where to give aid and where to send soldiers. In the case of America for example, though the face of their war efforts usually states they are there to promote peace and freedom there always seems to be a necessary personal gain, be it war profiting from selling weapons or taking large gallons of oil and minerals back home. Then it seems countries that are in similar states of poverty and tyranny but without the natural resources go largely ignored and the atrocities are allowed to carry on. A ‘us and them’ culture does seem to be very much existent in the UK, Neuro-‐psychologist Joshua Greene sheds some light on why we consider our fellows from across the sea as so different and with less empathy, ‘our ancestors did not evolve in an environment in which total strangers on opposite sides of the world could save each other’s lives… Our ancestors did evolve in an environment in which individuals standing face-‐to-‐face could save each others' lives…
we would have evolved altruistic instincts that direct us to help others in dire need, but mostly when the ones in need are presented in an "up-‐close-‐and-‐personal" way.’ (2) Distance apparently matters and a personal connection is very important for people to help, which goes somewhere into explaining why a government wouldn’t be solely altruistic. Then again there are plenty of organizations made up of people who feel responsible for people they’ve never even met, so the governments choices on who to ‘help’ and how can never be a true representation of the publics views. Another example for people not helping is the ‘just following orders’ argument. People in general are brought up from an early age to be obedient, whether it be towards parents or teachers, we learn to comply with the demands of authority figures. This usually works well as it allows law and order but in cases such as World War Two where Hitler and his Nazi party came to power, six million Jews were allowed by the German citizens to be systematically collected and killed. During the trials of Nazi war criminals such as of Adolf Eichmann they all began to give the same plea of just following superior orders, this kind of excuse became known as the Nuremberg defence. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram was interested by these trials and eventually wrote the paper ‘Behavioural Study of Obedience’ (1963) to shed some light as to why its human nature to follow orders unquestioningly, submitting to authority. Milgram conceived an experiment that would go towards proving how an everyday person could be made to go against his or her own moral values when facing the power of an authority. He gathered and paid a selection of forty average working American men to participate in his test in the labs of Yale. The participants were each put in a room where they were introduced to a false scientist playing the role of emotionless authority figure and a stooge fellow ‘volunteer’ that would play the victim, the stooge would go into another where he could only be heard, the subjects were made to believe the stooge was set up to electrodes. The men were then asked to ask the stooge a set of questions of which if he answered wrongly they were to give him an electric shock increasing the voltage each time, the stooge would purposely answer 1 in 4 questions wrong and act in more pain with each shock. Eventually the stooge would fall silent, which in itself would be classed as a wrong answer (Fig 2). Milgram wanted to see how far the subjects would go with following the orders of shocking the stooge. The results were far from what was originally expected with sixty five per cent of the participants continuing the test to the end administering out what they thought was 450V, a killer shock. On asking them why they answered that they thought they were helping advance knowledge, felt obligated by the pay and trusted the scientist that it was safe despite what they heard from the stooge screams of pain next door. Replications of the test in other countries showed variations, Asia was generally more obedient whilst Canada was less. Milgram concluded it was “Not so much the kind of person a man is, as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act” (3) and showed that humanity was not only capable of not helping but also capable of being made the villain. Branching off from Milgram’s experiments Philip Zimbardo set out to see how people behaved when put both in positions of absolute authority and in roles of subordination in his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. In 1971 he gathered twenty-‐four students and assigned then to the roles of ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’, using the university basements as a make shift prison block he let them all play out their positions. Things quickly descended out of control, with the guards simply becoming becoming bored they began to abuse there power over the prisoners, degrading them further and further leading to breakdowns. (Fig 3)
This revealed as Zimbardo put it, the ‘power of social, institutional forces to make good men engage in evil deeds’ (4), situations being the cause of people’s ‘evil’ actions rather than their personalities, the Lucifer Effect as he would later call it. People have been shown to act differently even depending on the clothes they are wearing there’s an experiment in which people were given KKK outfits and nurses uniforms, the results showed the people in KKK outfits were more prone to acting crueller while the group in nurses uniforms were shown to be more helpful in there given tasks. There was a particular incident in America that worked out to be the ultimate large scale adaptation of the Milgram experiment, all across the U.S.A, air force missile bases were given the launch codes to fire a nuclear strike in retaliation of devastating Russian attack, unbeknown to the men behind the missile switches this was all a test with very interesting results. While fifty percent of the men followed the orders to return an attack, the other half refused to launch, most likely seeing the futility in killing innocent lives in another country whilst all was already believed to be lost at home, this further reveals how people are very much split down the middle between following orders and questioning them when they conflict with their own morals. Of coarse there are multiple internal factors that come into play when a person is presented with someone in need of help, such as factors of personal safety to take in account. The bystander may have social prejudices that affect the likelihood of a victim being helped or not, be it their race, class, sex, age or sexual preference. These prejudices are developed in us from an early age, as the South Pacific song goes ‘You’ve got to be taught how to hate’, and research is showing this to be the case. My own social prejudices would be in terms of class where I’d feel more comfortable helping someone smart in attire in need of money for travel or food, as appose to a street beggar asking. I have an uneasy distrust of beggars associating them all wrongly with crime and drug abuse unlike the tidily dressed stranger who I’d judge innocent and trust enough to help, though they could just as easily be a con. All these misconceptions link to the ‘Just-‐ world hypothesis’ in which as social psychologist Melvin Lerner states ‘people have a need to believe that their environment is a just and orderly place where people usually get what they deserve’ (5), this looks at the belief that bad things only happen to bad people. Leading to victims being blamed for their circumstances such as homelessness and rape based on their character traits (i.e. low status, race, flirtatious natures), allowing society to go on with its illusion that they are safe and in control as long as they do right and are in the ‘right’ group. Lerner did however emphasize the person judging is less likely to blame if they share common traits with the victim or if the victim is of high status or attractiveness. When considering the kind of person that would help, it must be questioned if one person can always be a Good Samaritan or will there always be a situation where they wouldn’t help. Is there no such thing as the perfect Samaritan, an undeterred hero? As for what heroism is, phycologists such as Philip Zimbardo believe it is made up of ‘four independent dimensions’ (6). Heroism is someone on a ‘quest’ to save a life or preserve an ideal. An acceptation of the consequences, risks and sacrifices involved. Heroism can both be passive and active, either the hero is in the spot light helping or can be passively resisting. Heroism can be a sudden action, a one time event or something that prevails over a long period of time where the person has to make the choice everyday whether to help or not. We all have the potential to be heroes however we need to debunk the idea of the ‘heroic elect’ first in which we are made to feel there are two groups of people the rare heroes and the common bystander. The idea of what a hero is and who it can be is lost more and more, in the media, too role models and sport stars who are labelled ‘hero’s’ taking away from the idea of the
common man being able call themselves a hero as well, changing the concept of heroism to that of celebrity. There may be many non-‐altruistic reasons someone helps, the personal gain of fame or financial gain are both possibilities in certain scenarios. Personal factors such as a shared experience can come into play, if the passer-‐by can relate to the person in need they are more likely to empathise. Relation to victim affects the probability especially, for example with the maternal instinct a parent they would usually feel the need to help their child. Our individual capabilities both physically and mentally can also decide if we are able to help or not, in the case of people such as the police, paramedics, and other emergency serves it’s their professions to follow orders, to protect and serve both out of a sense of duty and for a job, these people have been trained to use their capabilities to aid, but other everyday people may view themselves capable of helping in varied situations, be it for their strength, their financial status or their intelligence. To try and reach a solution to my original posed question of what makes a person a Good Samaritan against a person unwilling to help, I don’t feel there’s a clear definitive answer, it appears not simply to just be a case of good and bad people both willing and unwilling to help, the instinct to help appears to be naturally strong in a large percentage of us, but countless outside factors as well as internal ones I’ve only touched upon affect how we behave in certain situations. John Darley and Bibb Latané observations of the bystander effect show how we may not even see the trouble or if we do we may diffuse the responsibility onto others surrounding us. We see it’s not always even our choice to help when our governments act above us in deciding whom to aid. Milgram and Zimbardo have shown how external factors not only can stop us helping but how they can also bring out the worst in us, those in positions of power especially. Internal factors however do have a strong sway in our decisions as well, though factors such as racism usual have an exterior origin that is drilled into us at an early age. To conclude we seem to all have the potential to help, by understanding it’s too easy to be comfortable in a crowd and by knowing others will not help due to this, we have to be the ones responsible. Awareness of the factors is the key to a possible solution. We need to prepare ourselves for these situations, use the time while in a comfortable state to theorise what would be best to do if an event ever occurred in which others need our help. How we’ve been brought up seems to be a major factor, educating future generations of children with this knowledge will then hopefully make us better prepared to help our fellow stranger. Fig 1, Kitty Genovese
Fig 2, subject operating false shock generator
Fig 3, ‘Guards’ would wear sunglasses to limit eye contact with prisoners, prisoners names were also replaced with numbers
Bibliography (1) Banksy (2005) Wall and Piece, United Kingdom, London, Century (2) Greene J. (2007) Nature reviews Neuroscience, www.nature.com/nrn/index.html (3) Milgam S. (1974) Obedience to Authority: An Experimental view, United States, Harper & Row (4) Collin C., Grand V., Benson N., Lazy M., Ginsburg J. & Weeks M. (2012) The Psychology Book, United Kingdom, London, Dorling Kindersley Limited (5) Ross M., Miller D., (2002) The Justice Motive in Every day Life, United Kingdom, The press syndicate of the University of Cambridge (6) Zimbardo P. (Ph.D) (2006) Greater Good-‐ The Banality of Heroism,http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_banality_of_heroism/