Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  But in a large group, they stay bolted to their seats and watch while I turn my back to them, embarrassingly get down on all fours, and crawl around picking up my pile of meaningless papers. It’s not a pretty sight, I assure you—but think of it as just punishment for their apathy. And consider yourself lucky that the publisher nixed my plans for a photo insert for this book.

  REMARKABLY, WE’RE SO used to feeling anonymous and detached in crowds that simply asking people to imagine being surrounded by others is enough to make them less helpful. In one creative set of studies, researchers instructed participants to visualize themselves in a crowded movie theater or out to dinner with thirty friends.5 After answering several unimportant questions—like, what room temperature would they prefer in the theater—participants moved on to an ostensibly unrelated charity survey.

  Having just pictured themselves in a crowd, respondents pledged smaller donations compared to participants who had earlier been instructed to visualize an empty theater or more intimate dinner for two. In a follow-up study, the same researchers gave a new set of respondents a word categorization task. Participants who had been asked to imagine a crowd showed quicker reaction times to words like “unaccountable” and “exempt.” Even being with imaginary people shapes how we think about helping.

  You can understand why we get used to feeling this way in crowds. Take the movie theater example. You pony up six dollars for popcorn to go with the thirteen-dollar tickets. But then you just sit there passively when the projector goes out of focus. You don’t want to miss anything, so you assume that some other sucker will report the problem. It’s easy to skirt responsibility with dozens of viable candidates around to pick up the slack. And if that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission apparently adopted it as their official motto during the pre–bank bailout era.

  Over time, we learn to associate these two ideas: on the one hand, being in a crowd, and on the other, relinquishing responsibility.

  Crowd. Lack of responsibility.

  Crowd. Someone else will take care of this.

  Make the connection enough times, and eventually the mere thought of a group of people is enough to trigger passivity. It’s all very Pavlovian, but with detachment and disengagement instead of dogs and drooling.

  Again, though, what about the case of James Bulger? It’s one thing to feel apathetic in movie theaters, restaurants, and lecture halls—it’s another altogether to remain on the sidelines when a child is in danger. Is the effect of a crowd strong enough to shape our responses to actual life-and-death emergencies?

  Unfortunately, yes.

  Consider the following scenario: An undergraduate signs up for a research study requiring her to discuss with peers her adjustment to college life. To ensure that she’s willing to speak freely about personal issues, the researchers place her—and each of the other students—in her own cubicle with an intercom. The researchers won’t be listening in on the conversation, she is assured, and none of the group will ever see each other or learn the names of their conversation partners.6

  The intercoms are set up so that students each have two minutes when their microphone is the only one on. So one student speaks while the others listen, then another student has a turn, and so on. The conversation begins without incident. One student confesses, say, her difficulty getting used to an urban campus after growing up in a small town. Another reluctantly mentions a health problem that leaves him prone to seizures when under stress, a condition that particularly concerns him during finals week.

  In the second round, though, things take an unexpected turn. When the student who had mentioned a health problem comes on the air again, he quickly grows distressed. Stuttering loudly, he suggests that he could use “a little help.” With choking sounds interfering with his speech, he becomes increasingly incoherent until all that is audible are words like “seizure,” “die,” and of course, “help.” Then, radio silence.

  Having read about the Good Samaritan study, you’ve probably guessed that no one was in real danger in this scenario. The other intercom voices—including that of the seizure victim—were prerecorded for our undergraduate’s listening displeasure. But she doesn’t know that. In her mind, she’s listening in on a fellow student in the midst of a serious medical emergency. How will she respond? As you also might have guessed, it depends on how many other people she thinks are in the group with her.

  When participants in this study believed they were in a two-person conversation with the victim, 85 percent left their cubicle to alert the researcher to the ongoing emergency. When they thought they were in a three-person conversation, the number dropped to 62 percent.

  But what about respondents who thought they were part of a six-person group? Who believed that there were four other individuals with the same opportunity to help? Only 31 percent left their cubicle. More than two-thirds of these students stayed put and stayed quiet for a full six minutes after the apparent seizure had begun.

  Being in a crowd altered their behavior. Gender didn’t predict who helped and who didn’t. Personality type didn’t, either. No, it was the mundane situation to which they were randomly assigned that guided their reactions. It was sheer group size that played the biggest part in whether ordinary college students assumed the role of hero or remained mere bystanders, just like when I drop papers in my classroom.

  THE INERTIA OF INACTION

  In crowds, we’re simply less likely to see emergencies for what they really are.

  Many an emergency doesn’t seem so emergent while it’s happening. Passersby see three unsupervised youngsters on the street as an unfortunate but innocuous example of inattentive parenting. Apartment residents used to having sleep interrupted by drunken antics respond indifferently to late-night screaming. Sean Hannity views the unprecedented melting of glacial ice as simply reflecting the “natural ebb and flow” of global temperatures, not to mention a boon for waterfront condo developers in Nebraska. Et cetera.

  Situations, even emergencies, can be ambiguous. At the time, we often don’t know that they’re emergencies. So we use the people around us as guides. We gauge their reactions so that we may calibrate our own responses. If no one else seems alarmed by what’s going on—when everyone goes about business as usual—we assume that all is well. We see no reason to forsake inaction for action.

  The 1999 death of Ignacio Mendez received widespread attention. The reason? Mendez died on a New York subway, but no one noticed for more than three hours, giving him enough time to complete two round-trips from the Bronx to the Staten Island Ferry. Many viewed the circumstances surrounding Mendez’s death as an indictment of the very character of the city’s inhabitants. As his nephew suggested, “At 8:30 in the morning there’s a million people on the train, and nobody saw he was dead? It makes me feel that New York doesn’t have a heart. The people care only about themselves.”7

  His reaction is understandable. Most of us would be outraged by the unceremonious death of a loved one. And you can add to his case against New Yorkers the fact that similar incidents have occurred in the city since then.

  But a sweeping indictment of the New York personality isn’t persuasive to me. It’s just WYSIWYG all over again. What if you or I had boarded the number 1 train that morning at 9:30, taking a seat across from this large man who was sitting upright with his eyes closed and, by some reports, smelled of alcohol? How likely would you have been to shake his shoulder or whisper in his ear to make sure he was OK?

  As a transplanted New Yorker who grew up in the Midwest, I vividly recall my first visit back to the city, as well as my first subway ride as a child, which came complete with parental instructions regarding eye contact. I don’t remember the exact details of what they told me, but I’m pretty sure that they didn’t give a green light to poking nonre-sponsive passengers seated nearby.

  If you had boarded Mendez’s subway car at 9:30, you would have looked around to see fellow passengers caught up in th
e ordinary activities of their daily commute. Maybe you would have paused when catching a glimpse of Mendez, but no one else seemed concerned, so why should you be? Other passengers had been on the train longer than you—it would be logical to figure that they knew more about what was going on. Maybe they had seen him alert and awake just moments earlier.

  The assumption that everyone must know something you don’t—in this case, that there’s no emergency—is a reassuring one to fall back on. When no one in the crowd seems concerned by what’s going on, each of us feels more comfortable with the status quo, contributing to a cycle of inaction that only continues as new individuals enter the scene. You don’t know that it’s an emergency, so your calmness in the face of the unconscious subway rider assuages any concerns of the 9:45 commuters, and their subsequent indifference does the same for the 10:00 passengers. And so on.

  We attribute a certain wisdom to crowds, and not just in helping situations. In fact, chapter 3 explores this idea in more detail, pondering the ways in which being in groups sometimes leads to unusual forms of action rather than inaction. But our tendency in ambiguous situations to use other people’s responses to guide our own has clear implications for when and why we fail to help others.

  In a demonstration of this, the same two researchers from the seizure study described above arranged for vaporlike smoke to seep in from a wall vent while students were in the midst of completing a written survey.8 When this happened to respondents seated in a room by themselves, 75 percent of them quickly got up to report that there was some sort of problem. But of those students seated in a room with two actors who had been instructed not to respond to the billowing smoke, just 10 percent took action.

  That’s right, extraordinarily, nine out of ten respondents seated with a group stayed put as the room filled with smoke. Barely able to see the papers in front of them, they fanned the fumes away and kept at their questionnaire, sometimes through coughing fits. Persuaded by their colleagues’ apparent indifference, these students determined that the smoke wasn’t that unusual and certainly didn’t call for action. It was probably just steam, they suggested in post-experiment interviews. Or maybe some sort of air-conditioning leak.

  In crowds, emergencies transform into ordinary affairs right before our eyes.

  EVEN WHEN WE DO realize we’re witnessing an emergency, being in a crowd still leaves us less likely to get involved. Crowds diffuse responsibility. Look no farther than the ubiquitous mass e-mail to catch this process in action. In fact, just such a message popped into my in-box literally minutes before I wrote this paragraph. Sent by a well-intentioned administrator in my department, it read as follows:Dear Faculty,

  This student (please see attached message) was hoping someone could help her with advice regarding a summer internship. Do you have any ideas or recommendations for her?

  Thanks,

  Well-Intentioned Department Administrator

  It took me all of five seconds to file this message under “D” for Delete.

  Why? Because I’m busy. Because I don’t know the student in question. Because I’m well aware that any one of the other seventeen members of my department can answer her questions as well as I can. And because I know there will be no serious consequences to my inaction. To be brutally honest, there are plenty of minor, irritating costs to my getting involved in this exchange, with few tangible benefits to outweigh them.

  Of course, I’d feel very differently if the student had contacted me directly. Or if our administrator had forwarded the e-mail to me individually, with some explanation for why I’d be the ideal person to respond. In those cases, I’d seem (and feel) like a jerk if I didn’t send a reply, even if only to say, sorry, I don’t have any suggestions.

  Being in a crowd—even a virtual, cyberspace one—permits inaction. The crowd works like a release valve on the pressure to help. A direct e-mail request would have placed 100 percent of this pressure squarely on me, making failure to respond an uncomfortable course of action (although I, like you, have some coworkers apparently impervious to such discomfort, not to mention friends who never seem to mind letting others pick up the check). A mass e-mail request, however, spreads out that sense of responsibility, distributing evenly across eighteen of us the pressure to respond. Shrugging off 5.5 percent of the responsibility is easy. And my guess is that each one of my colleagues will do just that, leaving this student with no choice but to go it alone or contact someone directly.

  In other words, crowds allow us the luxury of shirking obligation. An engineer named Max Ringelmann discovered this a century ago when he had groups ranging from one to eight people pull together on a rope. Though the total force exerted increased as teams got bigger, the per-person average decreased. One person pulling alone generated 63 kilograms of force. A team of three produced 160 kilograms, translating to just 53 per person. A team of eight produced 248 kilograms of force, or only 31 per individual rope puller. So eight people didn’t come close to exerting eight times the force on the rope that one person did alone. And it wasn’t that they were getting in one another’s way: even when their fellow group members were actors just pretending to pull, individual participants still gave less effort when they were part of a team.9

  This is the same social loafing exhibited by the deleter of mass e-mail requests, the project team member who never steps up to take the lead, or the student who greets nonrhetorical questions during class with silence—and, sometimes, the charade of flipping through notebook pages pretending to look carefully for the answer but really just avoiding eye contact until the teacher calls on someone else. (Yes, we do realize that’s what you’re doing; we used to do that, too.)

  Responsibility diffuses in groups. Chemists talk about diffusion in terms of molecules spreading from areas of high concentration to low concentration. The same thing happens to feelings of obligation and responsibility in a crowd.

  What about in emergencies, though? Sure, workers jump at the chance to avoid extra, unpaid responsibilities, and most of us outgrow the desire to pull as hard as we can on ropes after fourth-grade summer camp. But how about when another person is in need?

  Well, there are potential costs to helping in an emergency, too. Physical danger. The time commitment of involvement. Embarrassment if your efforts prove unsuccessful or unnecessary. And in an increasingly litigious society, the risk of being sued because your lifesaving Heimlich maneuver left an ungrateful beneficiary with fractured ribs.

  Sometimes we’re willing to assume these risks. Like when they’re outweighed by potential benefits of offering assistance. Or when the costs of not helping are even greater—you’re on a first date and want to make a good impression or you’re just not sure how you’ll soothe your conscience later if you don’t lend a hand. But we’re less inclined to take such risks when people are around to pick up the slack. Why should I assume the burden when others are just as capable? There are cost/benefit analyses underlying our decisions about helping, even if we don’t compute them consciously.

  Having already offered an unsophisticated chemistry allusion, allow me to introduce some Half-Assed Physics (trademark pending). Helping is all about inertia. Objects at rest remain at rest unless newfound force is applied. Bystanders in emergencies are, by definition, uninvolved in the proceedings, and it takes a compelling force to change this as well. Being in a crowd pushes us toward passivity, leaving the path to helping all that steeper an uphill climb. Thus, the inertia of inaction only grows stronger when we’re in the presence of others.

  38 NOT-SO-SPECIAL

  Recognizing this power of crowds leads to the surprising conclusion that James Bulger’s ultimate misfortune may not have come in the form of who witnessed his final hours but rather how many witnesses did so.

  To be fair, there were far more than thirty-eight people who observed some portion of his ordeal. For starters, take the oblivious shoppers captured in the security footage at the Strand; also, those who crossed paths with the threesome but to
this day don’t realize that they did. It’s a safe bet that there were additional witnesses afraid of coming forward, who therefore never took the stand at trial or assumed their place in James’s tragic legacy. But the name “Liverpool 38” was catchy and specific and it stuck.

  Can the power of crowds account for their inaction? A closer look at the thirty-eight reveals little in the way of abnormal personality or individual idiosyncrasy that would otherwise explain their behavior:

  David Keay, a thirty-three-year-old taxi driver parked outside the shopping center, saw the older boys pull a recalcitrant James by the arms and assumed Bulger was playing the part of stubborn toddler, refusing to walk as many a two-year-old will do during a shopping outing.

  Kathleen Richardson, forty-five, was on a bus when she observed the older boys through the window, swinging James into the air as they walked. She recalled asking aloud what type of parents allowed a child that young to be out on his own, even with older siblings.

  Mark Pimblett, a driver for a dry-cleaning company, saw one of the older boys kick James. He took note but later explained that it never dawned on him that a kidnapping was in progress since “it’s usually grown-up fellas who do that kind of thing.”

  Elizabeth McCarrick, having just picked up her own seven-year-old, overheard the boys talking to a woman about how to get to the police station. When they walked off in the wrong direction, she called them back. The older boys explained that they had found James at the Strand and were taking him to the police. Confused as to why they were so far from the shopping center—not to mention why they had walked the wrong way after getting directions—she took James’s hand and said she’d accompany them. She only relented when one of the boys insisted that they’d handle things on their own.