Modern Day Good Samaritans
If we can set a rule for living our lives that commits us to helping anybody who we see being hurt or in need of our help, we’ll have the necessary mindset to step in when the situation arises. We won’t even have to weigh our options because the decision will already be made: we are one of the helpers in this world and that’s just what we do.
Yesterday I did what I do every few days: I took some recycling and trash down to my condos garbage facility area. It’s not a big deal and I’m so grateful that I have such easy waste management in my community, but I was kind of dreading it honestly because I knew what I would find when I got there.
The facility technical has a key code entry that is meant to restrict access only to residents, but above its walls and fence, there’s enough space for someone to toss trash and other materials like mattress and discarded broken furniture. And although the waste management company we use takes care of what is inside the trash and recycling containers, they don’t go out of their way to clean up around the containers.
So you can guess how that all plays out: little by little the trash and discarded items accumulate until last night when I open the locked door I was absolutely disgusted. I mean, one can turn a blind eye to a little bit of trash and justify not feeling responsible for cleaning up an area designed to house trash, but this was simply embarrassing.
For a few seconds I weighed my options. I could 1) complain to the building management and shove the responsibility on them, 2) I could justify leaving it alone since I knew that I personally wasn’t responsible for any of the mess and so I could keep my head held high, 3) I could even feel a bit of righteousness in not cleaning it up because what would that teach the people responsible for the trash build up if someone cleaned it up for them? Or 4) I could just clean it up and know that I would feel better about the situation and it might make the experience for all of my neighbors to have a cleaner facility.
So I took the last option. And to be completely honest, it felt great to be a part of the solution. For about the first 5 minutes or so. After that I just gritted my teeth and kept at it (with my mouth closed since I definitely didn’t want to taste any of the disgusting materials I was disposing of) until it was reasonably clean. And so far today the area has remained clean although I’m not certain how long that’ll last.
It reminded me of two psychological phenomena. The first is called the bystander effect. This refers to a predictable occurrence of people in public places or in common areas assuming that someone else will help or clean up or basically do the prosocial thing. The problem with that line of thinking though is that everybody else is thinking the same thing. So even though everybody would benefit at least a bit from someone stepping up to the place and do the right thing, often no one does.
The classic example of this is one of my favorite studies. Researchers observed students in a seminary training to become Christian ministers. In this scenario, the students were told that a major assignment would continue on the other side of campus in a different building. The experimental variable—the thing that was varied among groups—was the amount of time the students had to get to the building where the exam was to be held. Some students had plenty of time, others had just barely enough time if they hurried and one group was told they were late and they really had to dash.
What the students didn’t realize is that along their path to the building where their exam would take place, the researcher had staged an actor to be lying on the ground in obvious distress. How many do you think stopped to help? When I’ve heard this study be described in classes and when the results are talked about, the emphasis is always on the huge majority of students who didn’t take the time to help. Roughly two-thirds of them didn’t stop to offer any help. But the interesting thing is that the percentages vary widely depending on how hurried the students were. Among the low hurry group over 60% did offer some help. In the medium hurry group about 45% did, and only 10% among the extreme hurry group. Oh, and the subject of the assignment that the students were focusing on that took them from the first building to the next was, ironically enough, about the Good Samaritan.
There have been many other famous experiments geared around the same theme of the bystander effect. And two factors seem to impact our decision to step up to assist: 1) Is the situation clear and do I know what’s going on? And 2) am I in a hurry. The beautiful thing about knowing this, though, is that we can break this human tendency. Just by knowing that humans usually don’t help, assists us in doing the right thing even when we’re in a hurry and when things are ambiguous. If we can set a rule for living our lives that commits us to helping anybody who we see being hurt or in need of our help, we’ll have the necessary mindset to step in when the situation arises. We won’t even have to weigh our options because the decision will already be made: we are one of the helpers in this world and that’s just what we do.