Thanks for the reminder. I’d somehow missed that portion of the OP.
Well, yes, after even less time than 3 minutes I would have at least gotten up and poked my head out. I’m genuinely trying to picture myself in this situation and the closest analogy I can think of is when I was at the doctor’s recently and inside one of those little rooms, with the door shut. When I heard a banging outside, I didn’t open the door, but when somebody said “OW!” I did. And that’s probably as close as you can get to this situation.
I like to believe I would. I suspect that I would. I have never had to, so I don’t know for sure. But I’m pretty sure I would.
I used to stop regularly and help people whose cars were broken down. I don’t anymore because of the cel phones. I figure most of the people have already called someone and the tow truck can do a better job than I.
I love cell phones for this reason in particular… having one sometimes keeps me from acting like the idiot I am, when I realize I can open my car window and shout, “Do you have a phone? Do you need one?” OR stay safely in my car (or nearby but out of the direct action) and dial for help when there’s a problem.
And see, I have never stopped to help someone whose car was broken down. My parents yelled at me all my life about that and now my SO does. I’d be too scared to. So there’s something I never do.
I have stopped to help senior citizens across the street and stuff. About half the time I get scolded though. Old people.
Yes, and there was another famous study (somebody else will have the link; I’m still in morning fog) that showed exactly that. When there is a group, people wait for someone else to take the lead. That’s why people taking first aid are trained to point to one person in the crowd and say you call 911 - because if you just say ‘somebody call 911’ everybody waits for everybody else.
It is a scary trait of humans that they seem so easily to turn into sheep. In that experiment, though, there were some people who’d take independent action but the proportion is indeed small.
Me, I’m not someone who waits for the crowd or follows the crowd so, yes, I’d help. There was a young guy lying on the sidewalk one day that I saw while walking to work. While plenty of druggies and drunks can be found lying odd places, he was right in the walking path, with an arm on the road. I was just going to go over and ask if he wanted help (and if so, then buttonhole someone to call 911 because I haven’t got a cell) when I heard the sirens behind me and the paramedics showed up.
I don’t know who called them because nobody was standing around waiting for them but somebody already had taken action. I was glad of that.
In my opinion, it isn’t a terribly well designed experiment. As has already been mentioned, college students are so familiar with these social experiments by now that I think they will always be on guard for signs that the there is something more going on than the stated reason for their participation. They will, after all, have agreed to participate in something.
Even assuming they did not perceive that the argument was staged, it is not the type of scenario that would make someone believe that someone is in immediate and urgent need of help. “I twisted my ankle”? Yeah, I’ll be there in a few minutes. Not to mention the fact that the content of the argument itself might leave some feeling, “dude, you stole his girlfriend. Suck it up.”
An accidental injury is a better test. And yes, if I would be the first person on the scene, or those on the scene don’t look like they have it well handled, I do stop to help.
Ah! Here we are; it’s called the 'Bystander Intervention ’ project and it was inspired by the murder of a woman in New York where many people who could have helped her during and after the attack which killed her just passed her by.
People have replicated it various ways over time, including the Good Samaritan Study
Is it scary, or is it the reason we’ve come so far as a species? I don’t know if you’ve tried to work with a group of all leader-types, but I have, and it’s not pretty. Too much time is wasted on jockeying for position and arguments. Ultimately, nothing gets done as a team. The Sears Tower couldn’t have been built with 1000 architects and no workmen.
Gah! Those studies are disturbing. I’d heard the name “Kitty Genovese” before but had no idea what the context was. I am actually shocked. I literally cannot imagine hearing someone hurt and not doing something, no matter how many other people were around.
The Good Samaritan one… I’m not sure if I WOULD react to that. Growing up in the city where you see people lying in doorways fairly regularly, I think unless the person was in unmistakable distress - bleeding, or actively calling out to people for help - I might assume that he was not in need of interference. A lot would depend on where the person was, too - in the city, I’d probably walk past, but here in Suburbia, where people do not often lie on the sidewalk, I think I’d be more likely to react.
Interestingly, while humans in society do seem to have problems taking responsibility when faced with such situations, the actual case of Kitty Genovese was pretty badly misreported when it happened and has taken on a life of its own in the ensuing decades. Most people picture 63 people leaning out their windows watching a murder take place, then going back to their TV sets withoutr calling the police. (And then the teller of the tale concludes that “those people in New York are just unfeeling brutes.”) As bad as the reality was, it was not as bad as the legend has become.
Well no, I’m not sure it would be, in a study on aggressive behavior. The theory is that if it were an accidental injury, response times would be roughly the same, but having someone injured as a result of retaliatory violence (as you yourself implied, the sucker deserved it so s/he should suffer) would be key to the study.
I’ll be sending an e-mail to my spouse demanding all the juicy details (he has confirmed the study is NOT published yet) to address the various issues raised here. Since I trust the academic and scientific judgment of the man who knows the most about it (my husband’s boss), I’m hard pressed to think there are glaringly obvious holes in the design of the experiment… but I’ll find out as much as I can.
This is what I’m trying to get… if the majority of subjects believed the experiment to be staged, why was there a statistically significant difference in the number who helped between the control group and the experimental group, as well as a large significance in time waited to help? Did the control group as a whole judge the experiment to be staged more often than the experimental group? Why?
I’d be happy to know if there have any scientific studies later debunked due to this phenomenon of recognizing staging or fakeness. Has it ever happened that subjects afterward or later came forward and confessed to having understood everything, and deliberately not done what they otherwise would have done just to mess with people? Wouldn’t the subjects have a responsibility to inform the experimenters they knew what was going on? If we’re assuming a good portion of people who didn’t help weren’t pricks because they suspected everything was staged, we’re in the very least assuming a good portion of those people are pricks for deliberately screwing with scientific data. Maybe that should have been the OP: Would YOU mess up the results of an experiment?
Well. I of course won’t be back until late this evening…
The aggression related variable is the video game being played, isn’t it? I would think you would want to isolate that variable and ensure a sympathetic victim to respond to. As I said, this isn’t well designed to test response to an injury sustained during an aggressive encounter, nor is it my understanding that this is the intent. There are far to many emotional factors that aren’t being considered when someone witnesses an argument such as the one described.
It is absolutely the intent. A large body of research suggests that violent media does not contribute to random and arbitrary violence and indifference to suffering, but rather retaliatory aggression, or acts of aggression disproportionate to a perceived injury (dunno if you folks remember the “Violent Video Games” thread, but I discussed the factor of retaliatory violence there.) It is not illogical to suspect that if a person is more likely to be aggressive in a retaliatory way, they might also be more likely to be indifferent to retaliatory suffering. In order to test this theory of retaliatory violence, a retaliatory scenario would have to be staged. An accidental injury would not have tested this theory.
If you say so. I am only going by your thread title and OP. The title refers to helping “an obviously hurt person” not necessarily coming to the aid of a victim of violence. The OP describes the test group as one playing violent video games, and the control group as playing non-violent video games. I naturally concluded that the test was the reaction of violent vs. non-violent game players to an “obviously hurt person.”
What you are talking about now is media contributing to retaliatory aggression. You stress retaliatory. An interesting topic, but I am STILL going to say that the test described isn’t a well designed for this. The closest it would come to this is testing relative levels of empathy for the control and test groups, and again I don’t think it will do this very well. Sorry. I’m not knocking your husband’s work. I’m just offering some honest criticism of the test approach.
I have on occasion stopped to help an obviously injured person. I’ve done so when there was no other obvious looming threat (the injurer hanging about, for example) and when there was an obvious looming threat (helped break up a totally one-sided “fight” in progress).
I’m not sure I’d intervene in the situation you described. An ankle injury just isn’t that dangerous. Not to mention that the contents of the argument beforehand carry a very substantial “this ain’t your business, girl” vibe to them. Some shouting and a turned ankle, you’re probably on your own. Even if you’re moaning in the hall about how badly your ankle hurts, I’m probably still not going to get involved. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.
If I’d heard a fight escalating to a dangerous level, it’d be a different story.
Psychoacoustically, people can generally tell the difference between a recording and something actually happening in the hallway. I bet the vast majority of the people could tell, whether overtly or subconsciously, and that it affected their decision.
College students have most likely heard many tales of subterfuge involving such experiments. I know that if I was taking part in any experiment, no matter how benign, my BS meter would remain pegged the entire time and I’d be especially suspicious of anything out of the ordinary that happened.
We live in an infidelity-obsessed culture, so the whole “you stole my girlfriend, bro!” pretext for the scuffle would leave most people either smirking or feeling like the injured party “had it coming.” Now, if it had been something like, “Hey, my wallet!” or “Stop, theif!,” I bet you would have seen a different reaction.
“Ouch, my ankle!” - Really? Was “ouch, I’ve got a hangnail!” the runner-up? Try a gunshot or a stabbing sound or ANYTHING else than a poor lil’ twisted ankle. I’d laugh at someone if they had a twisted ankle - and I was a volunteer EMT!
That reminds me of the commercial with the old woman sitting in the chair alone and the narrator says “This woman almost had someone come and talk to her. She almost had someone bring her a meal. Someone *almost * called her on the phone to ask how she was. Someone *almost * drove her to the doctor.”
I’m sure that I’d help or I’d like to think I would. I don’t see how yelling to knock it off or to say your calling the police would put you in any danger. I’ve approached people for mistreating a dog.
Old people.
