Social Psychology (PSYC 386, section LN1) Paper Assignment for Spring, 2021 Darley, Teger, & Lewis, 1973, also looked at the Bystander Effect. Read their paper. You’ll also need Principles. Your paper must address the following points. Explain “Latané and Darley’s Model of Helping.” Use Principles as your source. You can stop explaining at “Assume Responsibility.” Show me you understand the concept. Explain, don’t copy, don’t quote, DO cite. If you don’t know what I’m talking about ASK ME. IMPORTANT Do NOT use the internet as a source. Wikipedia is too detailed and poorly sourced, verywellmind.com and simplypsychhology.org are insufficient. The best way to stay out of trouble is to use our (free) textbook. Download and read Darley, Teger, and Lewis, 1973. Skip the abstract. Do this carefully; this reading is the most difficult part of the assignment. Show me you understand Darley, et al. (1973). Explain, don’t copy, don’t quote, don’t paraphrase. I want your words, even if you don’t think they’re very good. Quotes show me you don’t understand it. Ask me for help if you need it. What were Darley, et al. trying to demonstrate about the Model of Helping? Did they succeed? (Hint: look at the percent of participants who responded in the three conditions.) Refer back to your descriptions of The Model of Helping and Darley et al.’s study. Type it up, put it into APA, submit by Sunday, May 16, 11:59 PM. There is no time for late papers. Late papers will take a letter grade penalty each day it’s late. Get this done early. APA: Let’s keep it simple. I only insist on the following. a. Paper has a title page, with the page number in the upper right corner. All other pages have the correct page number also in the upper right corner. b. Cite! You’ll only need two sources: Principles and Darley, Teger, & Lewis, 1973. c. The last page has your two references in proper APA, 7th edition format. I’ve done Principles for you, if you know where to find it. Darley, et al., isn’t hard, but the fact that I’ve used three different formats (at least one wrong, on purpose) should tell you that you need to look it up. Try the Purdue OWL. d. It’s not APA, but use proper grammar and spelling. How long should it be? I don’t count pages. It could be done in two pages (not counting the title page, body page, references page.) How long will it take to do the assignment? Three to four hours, I think. Submit it through Blackboard, through Safe Assign. Submit, it should go to Safe Assign automatically. Go back and look at your originality report, and see if you’re too close to somebody else’s writing. If it looks suspiciously close, change your writing and resubmit. NOTE: References are going to be perfect matches, and since the paper will be really short, there may be more suspicious matches than usual. If you have matches to internet sources, absolutely reword those, and I don’t mean “change a couple of words and now it’s my writing.” Safe Assign gets slow. Don’t wait until the last minute. Safe Assign may take an hour to clear if lots of people are using it. Grading The paper will be scored on a 0 – 10 point basis. Did you understand the sources and write good summaries of them? 0 – 4 points. Did you understand Darley, et al.’s results and explain how the results supported / did not support their hypotheses? 0 – 4 pts. Did you meet the minimal APA requirements I asked you to, including the reference list? 0 – 2 pts. Points will be deducted for grammar and spelling mistakes. Lots of points, maybe all of them, will be deducted for plagiarism. The work is the understanding, not the writing. Understand Darley, Teger, and Lewis (1973) and you should be able to easily pull a B on this assignment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1973, Vol. 26, No. 3, 395-399 DO GROUPS ALWAYS INHIBIT INDIVIDUALS' RESPONSES TO POTENTIAL EMERGENCIES? 1 JOHN M. BARLEY 2 ALLAN I. TEGER 3 Princeton University University of Pennsylvania LAWRENCE D. LEWIS Princeton University Previous studies of bystander intervention in emergencies have found that an individual is more likely to intervene if he witnesses the emergency alone than as a member of a group. The present study qualifies this general finding in the framework of group communication processes. Pairs of subjects working on a task overheard a loud crash in an adjoining room. Some pairs of subjects were seated in a pattern that facilitated the visual communication exchanges that naturally occur when a noisy event takes place and others were seated so as to block these communications. When the emergency occurred, groups which could exchange reactions were not reliably less likely to respond than were a third group of subjects who faced the emergency alone. The blocked communications groups tended not to respond and responded significantly less than the other two conditions. These results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that a group of people who witness an ambiguous event interact to arrive at a definition or interpretation of it, which then guides each member's reactions to the event. From studies of bystander intervention in emergencies, one empirical generalization emerges: An individual who witnesses a potential emergency alone is more likely to intervene than one who witnesses it as a member of a group. This has been found whether the emergency involves smoke pouring into a waiting room (Latane & Darley, 1968), a noisy accident to a girl in a nearby room (Latane & Rodin, 1969), a person stealing a case of beer from a liquor store (Latane & Darley, 1970), or a child crying in another room (Staub, 1970, true of older children but not younger ones). One explanation for this effect postulates a decision process on the part of the individual bystander which is itself the result of two other processes. First, in our culture, "it is considered desirable to appear poised and collected in times of stress [Latane & Darley, 1969, p. 249]." Second, when an am1 This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant 2293. 2 Requests for reprints should be sent to John Darley, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540. 3 The second author was a postdoctoral fellow at the Educational Testing Service at the inception of the study. biguous event occurs, an individual bystander will be considerably influenced by the ways in which other bystanders are reacting to the event. Therefore when a bystander is faced with the calm reactions of other bystanders, he may infer that they do not define the event as an emergency, and so he begins to define it himself as no emergency. Thus a state of "pluralistic ignorance" may develop (Latane & Darley, 1969). Although the bystander apparently conforms to the passive, nonhelping behavior of the other people, he does so because he has decided nothing serious is taking place, so that it would be inconsistent with his own thinking to intervene. He has been influenced by the other people, but influenced to accept a particular cognitive definition of the event. This is similar to the process which Asch has labeled, "a change in the object of judgment" rather than a change in the judgment of the object. Inaction, then, is a rational response to a situation that is reinterpreted to require no intervention, rather than an irrational compliance with others' inaction. This explanation might be called the "definition of the situation" hypothesis and can also account for the increase 395 396 J. DARLEY, A. TKGKR, AND L. LKWIS in helping behavior that other investigators have found when an individual observes another person helping (Bryan & Test, 1967; Ross, 1970). This suggests that, as in the case of conformity research (Allen & Levine, 1968; Asch, 1952), any signals which break the uniformity of the group's apparent unanimous indifference to the emergency may free the individual to consider the possibility that the event is in fact an emergency and act accordingly. One set of signals which may work in this manner is the group of signals which we might call "startle responses" (orienting toward the noise, jumping, facial expressions of concern, etc.). In previously mentioned experiments, in which many subjects apparently defined the event as a nonemergency and offered no help, the subjects were either engaged in tasks which made observing each other's startle responses unlikely (Latane & Barley, 1969; Latane & Rodin, 1969; Staub, 1970) or the nature of the emergency was such as not to provoke visible startle responses. There is some reason to believe that the startle response of an individual, if it is visible, might be taken as particularly revealing of his true thoughts. Goffman (1969) and others have suggested that we tend to place more faith in information from others which is spontaneous and apparently out of their control. Thus facial expressions are often seen as a more valid indication of the feelings of others than is their overt behavior, for the former are thought to be more spontaneous and less subject to control than the latter. The startle response, then, is a naturally occurring response that signals some break in the unanimity of the group's passive reactions to a potential emergency, and thus provides a mechanism for testing the definition of the situation explanation for the typical lack of response of groups witnessing emergencies. An emergency was staged in a room adjacent to one in which two subjects were working on a visual perception task. The emergency was a noisy crash which signaled that some precariously balanced construction equipment had fallen on a workman. Some of the groups overheard the emergency while facing each other, and thus were in a position to see each other's startle response. Other groups were oriented away from each other. In a third condition, subjects faced the emergency alone. The predictions were that the subjects who overheard the crash while alone would intervene, while the nonfacing groups would redefine the event as no emergency and therefore fail to intervene. These experimental conditions replicate those of previous experiments, and the predicted findings would replicate these results. The orientation hypothesis predicts that the subjects from the facing groups will be more likely to define the event as an emergency, and thus more likely to offer help than the subjects from the nonfacing groups. METHOD Subjects Fifty male Princeton University undergraduates served as subjects. All were volunteers who were paid for their participation. Procedure Subjects, either in pairs or alone, arrived at the experimenter's office where they were given a short printed paragraph explaining the two types of activities in which they would be participating. The first activity centered around various tests of vision while the second involved an artistlike sketching situation. They then accompanied the experimenter and his assistant down the corridor to a room where the vision testing was conducted. Here they took several vision tests, while the assistant recorded their responses. After the vision tests had been completed, the experimenter explained that he had arranged to borrow a room from another research team for the sketching task which would take up the remainder of the session. Subjects then followed the experimenter upstairs to the sketching room where the door was found to be locked. The experimenter expressing consternation over the fact that the door was "supposed to be left open" for him, muttered something about checking to see if there was anyone around who had the key. He knocked next door and after a short delay a workman (actually a confederate of the experimenter) with screwdriver in hand opened the door. The experimenter pointed down the hall to the sketching room and asked if the workman had a key that would open the door. The workman replied that he didn't but speculated that they could get in through a closed but unlocked floor-to-ceiling partition which separated the two rooms. The experimenter asked the subjects to follow him through the workman's room as he pulled open the sliding partition, admitted the subjects Do GROUPS INHIBIT RESPONSES TO EMERGENCIES? and himself into the sketching room, thanked the workman, and pulled the partition shut. Both rooms were filled with an array of electronic equipment and construction materials, apparently being used by the other investigators from whom the room had been borrowed. Part of the construction materials included several large, heavy woodenframed metal screens balanced against a wall, which the subjects had to step around in order to enter the sketching room through the partition. When the subjects had been seated, the experimenter -read a prepared set of instructions which directed them to make a sketch of a model horse that was in front of them. They were told not to be concerned about how artistic the sketches were but that the experimenter merely wanted a rough idea of perspective in sketching from a real model as compared to other groups who would do their sketching from a photograph of the model. Subjects were instructed not to talk and to do their sketches independently. The experimenter then announced that he was going back downstairs to correlate the results of their vision tests and would be back in about 10 minutes. (Actually the experimenter joined the experimental assistant in an observation room to observe and record the session through a oneway mirror which was disguised by drawings which were hanging in front of it.) Experimental Conditions In the facing condition pairs of subjects were seated face-to-face across a table on which there was a large plastic model of a horse along with sketching pads and drawing pencils. For the alone condition, single subjects were seated in one of these same two positions 50% of the time on one side of the table and the remaining 50% on the opposite side. In the nonfacing condition pairs of subjects were seated back to back, and each subject had his own horse model in front of him on a small stand. Ten subjects were run in the alone condition and 10 pairs of subjects in each of the other two conditions. The experimenter was blind as to which of the two group conditions was being run until, of course, he entered the sketching room and could see the arrangement of the chairs. The Emergency Incident Four minutes after the experimenter had left, the workman staged the emergency incident. Pushing over the heavy screens that had been balanced against the wall on his side of the partition produced a resounding crash which was immediately followed by an exclamation of "Oh, my leg I" and a series of painful groans lasting for 3 seconds, which were actually emanating from a concealed tape recorder. After an interval of 5 seconds there was another shorter set of groans heard for 1.5 seconds followed by complete silence. The confederate positioned himself on the floor next to the fallen screens, holding his leg. 397 TABLE 1 LlKiaiHOUl) AND Sl'KKD OF HKU'ING RESPONSES "/„ Average time of responders in seconds Alone 90 Facing 80 Nonfacing 20 11.9 (9 individuals) 16.6 (8 groups) 17.0 (2 groups) 14.4 Condition M responding (N = 10) 63.3 Average time of all subjects in seconds 46.7 85.3 291.4 141.1 Dependent Measures and Debriefing Subjects' reactions to the incident were recorded and timed. The reaction time was measured from the moment of the crash until the occurrence of some overt helping response. For most subjects who helped, the measure of response latency terminated when they grasped the handle of the partition and began ,to slide it back to investigate the situation in the other room. The shouting of an inquiry through the partition was also considered a helping response and the reaction time measure was ended as soon as the subject called out loudly enough to be heard and acknowledged by the confederate. After 6 minutes of observation the experimenter returned to the sketching room and inquired how things were going. If there was no spontaneous report of the incident, the experimenter commented that a secretary had mentioned that she had passed by the room several minutes before and had heard some sort of "commotion." After listening to the subjects' replies, the experimenter carefully explained the nature and necessity of the experimental deception and assured the subjects that the other person was uninjured. He then administered a short questionnaire to obtain subjects' impressions of the incident and its perceived seriousness, previous experience with emergencies, and possible suspicion about the experimental procedure. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The results supported the experimental hypothesis: As Table 1 indicates, 80% of the groups in a face-to-face orientation responded to the crash with the offer of some kind of help whereas only 20% of those groups not facing each other reacted when the incident occurred. (Fisher's exact test, p < .01). Ninety percent of subjects reacted to the crash when alone. Therefore 99% of a set of two-person groups could be expected to contain at least one individual who responds (1 — .10 2 ). If the effect of the group on helping behavior is due to anything other than a simple increase in number of 398 J. BARLEY, A. TEGEK, AND L. LEWIS people over the alone condition, then the rate of helping in a group should be significantly different from 99%. The &Q% response rate of the face-to-face groups was not significantly different from the value 4 (p — .24) while the 20% response rate of the nonfacing condition was significantly smaller (Fisher's exact test, p < .Ol). 5 Helping rate was thus affected not simply by the presence of other bystanders, but by their physical orientation vis-a-vis each other; groups in a facing orientation were more likely to respond than nonfacing groups. In fact, the facing groups were not significantly slower or less likely to respond than were individuals who were alone when the incident occurred. What happens in the face-to-face situation which increases the level of helping over the nonfacing situation? There are a number of processes which may be involved—all of which are related to the definition of the situation. First, the observer receives contradictory information (the other observer does not give help, indicating that the situation is not an emergency; the other observer also shows a startle response or worried expression, indicating that the situation is an emergency). Since all the available information from the other person does not support any single interpretation, the first observer feels free to respond as do the subjects in the alone condition—that is, as though it were an emergency. Second, the startle response is a spontaneous communication and as such it is given greater weight (following Goffman) than the more controllable and less spontaneous decision to refrain from helping. Third, the individual not only observed the startle response sequence of the bystander, but also produced one himself. Realizing that the other observer in the face-to-face situation 4 For simplicity these calculations were made, assuring an expected response rate of 100% rather than 99%. 5 If the speed of response results are analyzed by analysis of variance procedures and multiple comparisons (on the time scores), the above results emerge more strongly (F = 9.60, p
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