Where you the one delivering the blows or one of the guys holding him down?
I question the validity of these experiments.
The subjects likely failed to react to the staged violence for the same reason you fail to react to movie violence or even simple roughousing - at some level you know it’s not real. People generally feel some level of anxiety around real violence and if your “spidy sense” doesn’t go off, you probably don’t bother with it.
Instead of narcisism, that could be another reason the subjects didn’t react. As a society, we are so inundated with fake violence that we’ve become desensitized to it. It may take us longer to recongnize real violence.
Wow. That boggles the mind. How can anybody think that someone had (an injury) coming?
If this isn’t a product of all the violence in pop culture, then what else is it? There’s a plethora of shows where people ‘take the law into their own hands’ and act out of revenge - and these acts are violent acts. Used to be there were social norms and declaring oneself arbiter of justice in the place of legitimate authority was not part of the regular mores of society.
Holy cripes. What kind of people laugh at others’ pain? :eek:
I’d like to think I’d help, and, for the record, I’ll say I helped, but I wouldn’t know for sure until it happened. If I DIDN’T help and I realize it afterwards, I’d be seriously pissed at myself for not helping.
Not so much laughing at other people’s pain, but more “not interfering in someone else’s life uninvited absent compelling need.” I probably wouldn’t laugh (although if I were an EMT who just got called out for a twisted ankle I might roll my eyes at my friends about it later), but neither would I feel compelled to make the whole scene (which from the earmarks sounded ugly) my business.
Neither to I accost random strangers who look slightly unwell on the subway to ask them if there’s something I can do for them. I might ask a friend or co-worker who looked like they were in distress, but unless there seems to be some kind of emergency situation (and a twisted ankle so doesn’t count as an “emergency”), I’m going to assume that competant adults are capable of seeking out assistance that they require. If asked for assistance by someone who seems to be in distress, I’ll offer it.
If I’d heard “I think I broke my leg/ankle” then I would have gone to help. Or if I’d heard serious altercation noises followed by silence - or anything that didn’t pretty much sound like a fight over romantic entanglements followed up by pushy-shovy and someone storming off and someone else with minor injuries carping about them. If asked for assistance, I invariably assist as helpfully as I can manage. But going out of my way to stick my nose into someone else’s problem absent some sort of emergency, nope. I don’t want random strangers involving themselves unasked in my life, and I try to return the favor.
I am, too. One of these days, it’s probably going to get me killed, but I figure that dying trying to save someone else is a pretty noble way to go.
I’ve noticed the same thing. For the record, I’m 5’4" and about 110 lbs., but I have made men twice my size back down. (It works really well with wife-beaters who tend to actually be cowards who can’t stand up to strong, unintimidated women.)
So people’s responses can also depend on the way they interpret what they hear. If, in their minds, there isn’t real distress, then they won’t act. So the tester needs to account for that - it might be an interesting study to find out what kinds of signals cause what kinds of people to react.
It sounds as though the test assumes that everyone perceives the severity of the situation similarly but if they don’t, the level of their response will differ. It’s not that they’re not concerned about a real problem, but rather that they’re not persuaded there is a real problem.
I have to admit, upon further thought, the problem just doesn’t seem that big to me. A twisted ankle? Other people are right who say that’s just silly. And the whole “you stole my boyfriend” thing, yeah, I’d be a mite scornful. I NEVER air my dirty laundry in public. And I don’t go stealing other people’s boyfriends! So I might be kind of thinking “they get what they deserve”. Not nice, I know, but fact of life.
The OP seemed to imply (and later did actually say) that the “victim” would be calling for help. Broken fingernail, twisted ankle or dropped briefcase, if I heard someone make an exclamation that even MIGHT be construed as some kind of call for help, I’d be out the door making sure they were OK.
I’d surely help, but yeah, I’d be peeking out carefully to besure bad guy wasn’t going to jump me if I did (first trule of rescue is don’t be a bonehead and get yourself in a position where you need to be rescued too.
Weighing “hurt person” vs. “experiment ruined”… I’d go help the hurt person. An experiment can be repeated.
And as for the “twisted ankle”… yeah, if someone was yelling “My eye! My eye!” I’d be a lot more inclined to rush to their aid than if they are saying “Ouch, I stubbed my toe! You bitch!”
I agree with Waverly in post #26. From what I’ve read, and maybe I didn’t read carefully enough, it’s somebody crying out that he or she hurt his ankle. That’s not the kind of injury that brings me running. If I heard, “Oh my God, I think that’s my small intestine sticking out,” I’d probably run right over there.
I also agree with whoever stated that college students are on the lookout for this kind of experiment. Back sometime in the mid- late-eighties when I was in college, I had a mathematics class in the psychology building. One day while most of the class was seated and waiting for the class to begin, we heard a very loud bang/thump sound. I don’t think anybody got up to investigate. Personally, I was thinking, “I wonder if this is a psychology experiment.” It turned out it a gunshot and a teacher had been shot to death in the stairwell.
Around my alma mater’s residences, it was pretty common to hear “rape whistles” goingn off. You know the Fox Emergency Whistles that you can buy for camping or “walking alone at night”? No one ever investigated because people were playing around with them all the time. As far as I know, there was never a legitimate emergency, it was usually drunken asshats stealing whistles from girls and making noise.
Loud, crazy stuff on campus? I’d be wondering what those crazy drama students are up to. Same scenario at the grocery store, I’d probably put more effort into investigating. (I didn’t once go and check on two eleven-year-olds that I knew were goofing around with stage combat techniqies, but I figured I ought to double check in case I was wrong.)
Like car alarms. How often do you see people running out to save their car from a break in when it goes off in the parking lot.
Eh, FWIW, last week when a client of mine had an epileptic seizure in a public building, just about everybody (whether they worked there or were also visitors) stopped what they were doing and came to either help (brought paper towels, garbage can for her to throw up in) or ask what they could do to help (call ambulance, etc.). We were in a fairly small room off the main waiting area, and it sorta filled up.
I’d be out the door in an instant. I can say that fairly confidently because I’ve responded similarly in similar situations:
I once witnessed a minor accident involving a motorcyclist while I was waiting for a stop light at an intersection. I was out of my car and running toward him before the bike stopped moving.
Another time I heard shouts for help outside my ground floor apartment. I grabbed a baseball bat and was out the door in about 30 seconds. (It turned out to have been a minor fight between a guy and a gay hooker.)
You are correct, I didn’t state the matter of retaliatory violence in the OP, because I didn’t want this thread to devolve into an argument over the impact of media violence. While I feel this is an important issue, I was most concerned in positing possible explanations for the vast majority of people who didn’t respond to the injury. However, the fact that the injury was a result of retaliatory violence is quite relevant, as so many on this thread have demonstrated an utter lack of concern for a sprained ankle provided the person “deserved” it. It serves to answer my question… in response to “Would YOU Help an Obviously Hurt Person?”, in this context, many people have answered, “No.”
How would you improve on the experiment?
It’s not my husband’s work. My husband does media-aggression research at the Institute for Social Research at the university, but this isn’t even his boss’ work. This is his boss’ colleague’s work and the results have yet to be published. In essence this was an anecdotal description of a scientific study. I am not particularly emotionally attached to the study, but I will say I am on the whole less skeptical of the results given that it is but one in a vast sea of similar studies that come to similar conclusions.
For the record, I am the first person in this thread to have suggested that I may have perceived the incident to be part of the experiment.
Many people in this thread have proclaimed the experiment to be “staged” but no one has addressed my questions. One person posited the Milgram experiment as an example of the way staging affects social psychology experiments, but the cite didn’t address this issue at all and in fact seemed to contradict the notion that the subjects thought the Milgram experiment was staged. I’ve asked for any examples of social psychology experiments that were debunked because of proof that the subjects knew they were staged. I’ve asked for alternative explanations to the results of the experiment in the OP–if the majority believed the experiment to be staged, then WHY were the results statistically significant between the control and experimental groups? Furthermore, I’ve also asked, if the experiment was staged, why no one came forward and told the research assistant? It is absolutely the responsibility of anyone involved in an experiment to inform the scientists if some variable has been altered to render their response invalid. To not do so is gross irresponsibility, and while I wouldn’t expect everyone in the experiment to know that, I am convinced that at least some of them would.
Finally, I have emphatically stated that regardless of whether or not the subject suspected the experiment was staged, there was still a responsibility on the subject’s behalf to check to make sure this was the case. If there is a .001% chance that the person in question real and was injured, the responsibility was there. The nature of the injury (a sprained ankle) is also irrelevant. With regards to the moral obligation to help the person, the mode of violence (retaliatory) is also irrelevant. The fear of danger as a possible explanation isn’t altogether likely as the assailant had clearly left by that point, though I believe out of all possible hypotheses to explain the overwhelming lack of involvement, this is probably one of the most plausible. Otherwise I’ve heard a lot of excuses, the most telling being that the “victim” got what they had coming and it was an “emotional” issue for them… which is PRECISELY the kind of apathy/disconnect intended to be measured by the experiment.
I realize a lot of this is still drifting about in the theoretical since the study is unpublished and I’ve yet to receive more details from my husband yet. Still, I find the responses here awfully telling of how the results turned out the way they did.
Look, most of the people gave rational explanations for why they felt the argument over a lover and resultant ankle boo-boo made this an unusual case where they might not rush to help. If you want to judge us that is an entirely different thread, but you are welcome to it.
The nature of the injury is irrelevant? I disagree. There’s a spectrum. Blister, hangnail, pimple that’s about to pop, sunburn, toothache, twisted ankle, stomachache…these don’t rate an emergency response.
You’ve never been with a friend who said, “Ow, I think I twisted my ankle” while you rolled your eyes and humored him until he was ready to get moving again?
We had a process engineer that I always wondered how come he got so little respect, as in my experience factory workers give a lot of automatic respect to anybody with tech qualifications.
One day I was running a small experiment for him and it went wrong: the pot spilled with him, the shift manager and myself in the lab.
I switched off the heater, unplugged it, took the reagents out of the hood and closed it down between the time the SM said “look” and “out!”
The SM started getting the kitchen paper and saying “you got sand?”, for the spill, but then the engineer, who apparently had been taking air, started yelling “ohmygodohmygodohmygod…” and windmilling, making a face like the :eek: smiley only pink and very pale. We had to settle him down before we could get on with the cleanup :smack:
The SM confirmed that yes, there had been a couple other occasions when that engineer should have been the Person In Charge but had freaked out instead.
My faith in people was definitely bolstered last year after I fell in a subway station, breaking my ankle rather badly. A few commuters stopped immediately and tried to help me up and when it was obvious that wouldn’t happen, two of them helped me get out from under the stampede of rush hour, while one went and got the station manager. One of the ones who helped me move refused to leave until I was safely carted off in an ambulance, even though by that time the station manager was there. He just kind of appointed himself in charge of my morale I guess. I had a cell phone with me, but it was a moot point as there were people like that around. I wish I’d got names so I could have said thank you more adequately.
In response to someone yelling help in the next room, I suspect I’d go after a brief “WTF” delay. I’m one of those generally acclimated to being a helpful responder people. I should really get first aid training though as currently the helpful impulse probably isn’t as useful as it could be. I’m also a gamer and have a hard time believing that it’d affect me.
If I had the resources, I would perform a couple of variations based around:
The visibility of the fight. - Closed door, open door, no door.
The visibility of the injury afterwards - blood, bone protrusion, unconscious victim.
The location and visibility of the perp - exit sounds only, visible exit through open doorway, visible exit through locking door
The degree of injury - twisted ankle, broken ankle, gunshot, stabbing, unknown
Live actors vs. recordings
The “researcher” saying, “Wait here, I’ll be right back.” vs. “Ok, we’re done here,” and exiting a different door.
These might help to illuminate some other motivations. But frankly, you’re right. If there’s a statistical difference between your control group and your experimental group, only one variable was changed (the video game) and it’s repeatable, then it’s a valid experiment. Doesn’t matter if we don’t like what it says, what it says is that the variable has some impact on the behavior.
That’s the whole point of a controlled study. Theoretically, the same percentage of “a sprained ankle isn’t serious enough to worry about” folks and of “If someone has a hangnail, I’m there with cuticle cutters!” will be in each group. So it’s not a consideration, statistically. People with the same mindset should act the same way given the same situation. If a bunch of them act differently after playing a video game, we can strongly suspect that the video game had something to do with their behavior.
The study isn’t trying to suss out **all **the reasons why someone may or may not help, it’s trying to determine if this one thing (violent videogames) has any impact at all on behavior.
True. If we’re going to evaluate the merits of the study itself, I’d want to know more details. Number of total participants, age of participants (there are a large number of older college students - were any of those represented?), proportion of genders (in total and in each group), length of time between assistant leaving and “argument” commencing, acoustical considerations of the “argument” (i.e., did the exact same tape play for all participants? Was it equally audible to all participants? Did it always sound like an argument or did it start as a conversation and ramp up? Were there audible clues that it was a tape recording (such as static, abrupt start/stop, absence of any other noise from the hallway before the “argument”, etc.)? Were any clues consistent across all partcipants (Were there sounds of people other than the putative disputants in the hallway for some but not others? Were the traffic patterns in the area consistent for all the people in the study?), and a goodly other things not present in the OP.
The problem with evaluating the merits of this particular study is that we lack information about the methodology used. To be blunt, the methodology (from what I’ve read from the OP) sounds reasonably dodgy. Apparently it’s designed to test the response of test subjects to aural stimulants and determine variance of such response according to exposure to a violent video game. However, since the aural stimulus in quest was played through a closed doorway (and the participants presumably can hear through the doorway, or what’s the point?) the rooms cannot have been soundproofed. How did the experiment control for variations in ambient noise? Those variations would almost have to have a significant impact on the subjects’ response to aural stimulus.
My earlier posts were meant to elucidate at least one reason the participants might not have responded to stimuli. My concerns about the methodology are something else entirely. Plus, to be honest, olivesmarch4th seemed awfully distressed about the failure of the participants to respond to a request for help after they’d played a violent game. I was trying to provide a reasonable explanation for that behavior that was independant of the game. After all, I don’t play violent video games and I wouldn’t have responded under those circumstances either. Hopefully, I’m not a rat bastard scarred by too much violence on TV
