This is a really intersting study that was done ke!
Who Wouldn't Help A Lost Child? You, Maybe.
by Harold Takooshian, Sandra Haber, and David Lucido
Psychology Today, 1977
A lost child is one of the world’s saddest
sights. There he stands on the street, looking around
hopefully, his lips trembling, and his eyes startling to
fill with tears. It's enough to break your heart.
But is it enough to make you stop and help?
Suppose the child asks you to make a phone call for
him. Would you do it?
Conventional wisdom has it that city dwellers
don't help other the way folks do in small towns. They
just don't want to get involved. Most people seem to
believe this, based on their own experiences and a
number of well-publicized incidents such as the 1964
tape murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. She
died while 38 people stood by and watched.
Despite this general belief in city callousness,
little research has been done directly comparing
helping behavior in cities and towns. Even the classic
1970 work by psychologists Bibb Latane and John
Darley (The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He
Help?) didn't deal with the question directly.
Through an ingenious series of experiments,
Latane and Darley discovered that the more people at
the scene of an emergency, the less likely it is that any
one of them will help. This "diffusion of
responsibility," as they called it, inhibited even
well-intentioned bystanders from taking action.
When Darley and Latane compared the
bystanders who helped with those who didn't, they
found only one characteristic that distinguished
between the two groups: the size of their home town.
The smaller the community in which an individual
was raised, the more likely he was to help. Despite
this, Latane and Darley concluded that the Genovese
case and others like it could happen just as well in a
small town, if a sufficiently large number of witnesses
were around to share the irresponsibility. They based
this belief strictly on what they observed in cities,
since they didn't have the figures to compare what
actually happened in communities of various sizes.
We set up a direct comparison by creating the
same emergency situation in several large cities and
small towns. Since a lost child is likely to arouse
sympathy in almost any adult, we used children to
create our emergency.
A young child, six to ten years old, stood on a
busy street lined with stores and spoke to the first
stranger who passed by, saying, "I'm lost. Can you
call my house?" If the person asked for more
information, the child explained he had been shopping
with his mother and that they had been separated. The
child acted frightened, and showed the stranger an
identification card with his family's phone number.
Fourteen different children played the lost
child. Some were boys, some were girls; some were
black, some were white. They asked for help in
midtown Manhattan, on the Boston Commons, at City
Hall in Philadelphia, in the Loop in Chicago, and in
12 smaller towns around these cities.
An observer stood nearby to insure the child's
safety and to record the stranger's sex, race, apparent
age, and exactly what he or she said. The observer
also noted how many people were in the immediate
vicinity where they could hear the child's request, and
how many were in the general area.
The child's mother or guardian also stayed
nearby, out of sight. If the stranger refused to help, the
child waited a minute and asked another person. If the
stranger took the child to a nearby phone or started to
help in some other way, the mother or guardian
intervened. She ran up, called the child by name and
thanked the person warmly for helping.
Before starting the experiment, we tested the
lost child method in several locations. Several
colleagues warned us that the approach might not
work, since practically everyone would offer to help
the child. It didn't take long to disprove this
prediction. The first person nine year old Jackie
approached in a Brooklyn shopping center, two days
before Christmas, ignored her. The second snapped,
"So what's your problem, kid? I'm lost too." We were
sufficiently shaken that we decided to quit after one
more futile attempt that day. Clearly, helping a child
was not an automatic response, at least not for three
Brooklynites fighting the Christmas rush.
During the experiment, the children asked 184
people for help, 127 in the cities and 57 in the towns.
The results were clear. In the cities, 46 percent offered
help; in the towns, 72 percent
This is a big difference, quantitatively, but the
differences in the kind of help offered were even more
striking. In the towns, even the 16 individuals who
didn't help were usually sympathetic. Only three of
them simply said no and walked on. The others
offered excuses for not helping or suggested ways the
child could find his mother.
In the cities, 52 of the 69 who refused did so
abruptly. They ignored the child by walking past,
swerving, sidestepping, shaking their head "no," and
on two occasions, pulling themselves out of the child's
grasp. Others, almost without breaking stride, put
money into the child's hand B a dime, a quarter, even a
dollar bill B and sped on their way.
The strangest response was offered by an
elderly man walking along Seventh Avenue in
Manhattan. He stopped and spoke with the child,
patted him, shook his head "no," hesitantly, and
crossed the street. There he waited behind a lamppost,
craning his neck to observe the child. He watched for
15 minutes while others refused to help, until one
woman finally stopped and offered aid. Then he left
his post and went on his, way.
At other times, passersby referred the child to
someone else for help, or suggested, "Here's a dime
the call yourself." One New Yorker solved his
problem, if not the child's by saying confidently, "Go
into that restaurant. Your mother's waiting for you
there."
While the usual city response was cold, there
were some striking exceptions. Five or six passersby
responded much like Judy, a Manhattanite who treated
young Ann like a long lost daughter. Judy, introduced
herself by name, comforted Ann, asked if she were
hungry, and offered to buy her lunch before escorting
her home in a taxi.
In another instance, one helpful stranger asked
a second passerby for aid, and both then asked a third.
Within a few moments the child was invisible in the
center of a nine person rescue committee. If the
experimenter hadn't broken through to get the child,
there is no telling how large the helpful but indecisive
group would have grown.
We also looked at the factors other than the
city-town difference which might have influenced the
results: weather, time of the year, day of the week,
hour of the day, the child's sex, age or race, the
stranger's sex, age of race. None of them made much
difference.
We did find wide variations in the behavior
among people in the fours cities. The comparatively
few persons studied in each city makes it unfair to
generalize but these are the results: Bostonians and
Philadelphians reacted similarly. Two-thirds refused
to help; one-third helped. In New York, the split was
half and half. And in Chicago, two-thirds offered to
help, nearly as many as in the smaller communities.
Chicagoans were not only the most helpful;
they also offered help in an unusual way, by calling
the police. In the other cities, fewer than 10 percent of
the helpful strangers did this. In Chicago, 35 percent
of the helpers ignored the nearby phone and, instead,
flagged down a patrol car or went looking for s
patrolman.
Psychologist Stanley Milgram and other urban
theorists have referred to such behavior as an
"institutionalized response." City dwellers learn to
refer responsibilities such as picking up litter,
intervening in crime, or handling other social
problems to the authorities
But why did Chicago people look for a
policeman so much more frequently than New
Yorkers, Bostonians, or Philadelphians? Mayor
Daley's city has long had the reputation of a strong
police city, an image reinforced by the turbulence of
the 1968 Democratic convention there. Perhaps this
explains its citizens' "call-a-cop" response. One of us
had a chance to speak to an off-duty Chicago
policeman about our study. Without knowing what
we'd found, he volunteered that, "Of course people
should refer a lost child to a policeman. They aren't
supposed to get involved. It=s for the police to take
care of."
Our results were clear. Helping was the rule in
towns, and the exception in cities. This leaves the
question, "Why?" One answer is the Darley-Latane
diffusion of responsibility theory mentioned earlier,
the more people are around the less likely any of them
will help. This idea takes individuals of the hook by
explaining their actions largely in terms of the
situation rather than their personal choice.
If this were the main force at work during our
experiment, the lost child should have received more
help when there were fewer people around. This didn't
happen. The child was about as likely to be helped
whether the stranger was on a nearly deserted street or
in a teeming shopping area.
We prefer an explanation that focuses on the
individual, a theory of adaptation suggested by other
studies of urban behavior. This research shows that
city people adjust to the constant demands of urban
life by reducing their involvement with others. There
is so much going on that the city dweller learns to
ignore the constant demands on his time, his attention,
and his frazzled nervous system. He forgoes common
courtesies, such as saying "Hello" on the street,
refuses to do favor for strangers, and even ignores a
child's plea for help.
A recent book by Albert Seedman, the
detective who investigated the Genovese murder,
offers new information that might alter the way
psychologists look at the incident. He found that one
of the 38 bystanders had a clear, close-up view of the
murder; it took place on the landing directly below his
apartment door. He knew the victim personally, and
yet he remained alone in his apartment for several
hours, without telephoning the police. This inaction is
hard to explain by diffusion of responsibility.
Latane has observed that, "Perhaps if there
had been fewer than 38 witnesses present .... Kitty
Genovese might be alive today." Our lost child
experiment suggests otherwise. It would have been
better; it seems to us, if there had been many more
bystanders. This would have increased the chance that
at least one of them had just arrived from a small
town, and was not yet accustomed to hearing or
ignoring screams for help. He would probably have
acted, and perhaps save her life.
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