By Donald M. Taylor
It’s all over the news these days to the point that it hangs over the city like an invisible smog. The most recent was a lone gunman entering a junior college in my city on a shooting spree; two dead, several wounded, friends and families in grieving disbelief, and a city, province and country in quiet panic, constantly looking over their shoulder. And for some reason, outsiders point to my city as being particularly prone to such tragedies. We have certainly had our infamous share involving school contexts, but no one seriously believes that my city is tragedy prone in this way.
This is the context that had me striding in routine fashion into my university classroom ready to deliver a lecture on, of all things, social influence and conformity. The class is a large one with approximately 700 university students crowded into a large lecture hall with the main door-way at the back to my left. And, then it happened.
All of a sudden my micro phoned voice was challenged by a shrill, unsettling noise that sounded like a persistent fire-alarm with a rag over it to partially muffle and partially alter the sound. At first trill I made a negative remark about weird music choices for cell phones, and then quickly voiced the opinion that it was an intrusive fire drill, that as usual we would ignore.
Things took a sinister turn when students near the rear exit announced that the persistent trill was coming from something in the over-sized garbage can. I continued lecturing unperturbed for a good five minutes before I stopped in my tracks, threw aside the microphone, loped up the stairs, grabbed the huge garbage can with persistent trill reverberating, left the lecture hall and out the door where I placed the garbage can in the middle of a court yard, ran to the building office, reported the scenario, headed back to class, down the stairs and continued the lecture. No damage done, little class-time lost, class reaction limited to a few chuckles at the unexpected diversion, business as usual; end of story.
But try as I might I could not stop the scenario from haunting me. There was something I was missing, a serious lack of closure. The missing links were partially filled in at the next class two days later. I asked if anyone in the class had felt seriously frightened the minute the unaccounted for trill permeated the room. A significant subset of students quickly raised their hand. I then asked how many students did not consider the possibility of any danger and found the whole scenario rather amusing. Again, a visible subset of students responded. I can only assume the remaining one-third of students felt some disquiet coupled with an amusing class distraction. So what to make of this?
And then the light went on! The entire scenario was a real-world example of the precise topics I was teaching at the theoretical level in the course, and I was the focal guinea pig. For years I had been teaching about the seminal research in social psychology designed to explain why so often ordinary people seem callous to the point of neglecting others who are in need. The research demonstrates that while it is true people do not come to the assistance of others in a manner consistent with our idealistic view of ourselves, its not that people don’t care. First, you have to perceive a situation as a genuine emergency, worthy of intervention. Is the person lying on the sidewalk having a heart attack, or did he just slip and fall such that pride would not welcome an intervention, or is it indeed someone sleeping off a weekend binge. Sounds simple, but in reality it is not always clear, and indeed we may have a bias to avoid involvement by interpreting a situation as banal. The social psychology of the illusion of transparency coupled with pluralistic ignorance combine to explain what confronted the class. We tend to assume that our emotions are transparent to others, so of course anyone who was frightened would assume others would see their panic immediately. They in turn would see that others did not seem fazed in the least, hence the illusion of transparency. Pluralistic ignorance, the idea that we assume others don’t feel the way we do, would be exacerbated if we assume that fear would be readily visible in others. The garbage can trill in my class may be a case in point. With all the attention focused on terrorism, bombings, and attacks on students you would think that I and my students would be hyper-vigilant to anything that looked out of the ordinary, especially a weird noise emanating from a garbage can. So why did it take me, along with the majority of the students, so long to even consider any sinister possibility? This question is especially puzzling since it occurred only two short weeks following the deadly attack at a college less than five kilometers down the road?
I have even less excuse than my students. First, I have been teaching the subject for years. Second, and more compelling, is an experience I had years earlier where I found myself fielding questions on a radio show the day following a deadly attack on women engineering students at another university in the city. I was outraged at the number of callers who wanted to blame young male engineering students for not intervening when it was clear that the perpetrator was targeting women. I explained again and again that it would take considerable time for anyone to interpret the perpetrator entering a classroom as potentially dangerous. The last thing you would expect to encounter at a normal class in engineering would be a deranged young man entering, proffering an assault rifle, dividing the class on the basis of gender and then focusing his fury on the young women, all in a matter of moments. With my theoretical exposure to these issues you would think I might be quicker to interpret a situation as potentially dangerous. But no.
We also know from basic social psychology that we look to others to help define a situation. Who better to look to than your professor? Only this professor is oblivious to any danger, thereby serving as a role model for defining the situation. The amused demeanor of my students only gets me partially off the hook. Indeed, two students approached me after the following class and confessed that at the first trill they were petrified. Seeing me and most other students appearing unfazed did nothing to allay their fears, but it did prevent them from leaving immediately. As they noted, “all we had to lose was the remainder of one lecture which we could listen to via audio-tape that evening.” The power of conformity is fully exposed.
Finally, we know from the seminal research on helping behaviour that whether you are confronting a crisis situation alone or in the presence of others makes a big difference. That seminal research was stimulated by the widely publicized Kitty Genovese incident. A male perpetrator attacked the young woman, Kitty, in the full view of bystanders on their balconies of a high-rise apartment building. Although the perpetrator left after an initial attack, only to return shortly thereafter to continue the assault, bystanders failed to intervene. Not only did they not rush to the aid of Kitty directly during the 35 minute attack, they did not even scream and yell, or can you believe it, phone 911 until much later. It turns out, that part of the problem was that so many people witnessed the attack. In a number of ingenious experiments, Latane and Darley staged emergency situations where half the time there was a lone observer and for the other half there were three observers. Surprisingly, but consistently, there was less inclination to help when there were three observers. When a lone bystander observes an emergency there is more likelihood of intervention.
These consistent findings don’t make sense until we think about the diffusion of responsibility that arises when there are a number of observers, as in the Kitty Genovese incident. When you are alone, it is clear that you, and you alone, are responsible for responding to an emergency. When in a crowd the responsibility is diffused. It is not clear who is responsible and indeed you may assume falsely that others have already addressed the problem. Indeed, those who witnessed the attack on Kitty assumed that others had already phoned the police.
Whose responsibility was it to deal with any potential danger arising from the trill in the garbage can? Responsibility was diffused among 700. But let’s be honest. As the professor in the class surely the responsibility was mostly mine, but of course I wasn’t too quick off the mark.
Just when I was thinking that surely as a social psychologist I should not have been swayed by processes of social influence that I had taught for so many years. Just when I thought my psychological blindness had resulted in me not being the role-model I should be, colleague John Lydon came to my rescue. He reminded me of the research designed to address the question, does knowledge about a psychological phenomenon influence your behavior in relevant situations? The answer: only if the situation is identical in detail to the context used to uncover the psychological phenomenon, even a small difference in context makes the knowledgeable person oblivious to its relevance and application. Phew, I am half-way normal after all.