Would you forgo helping someone in need just because you’re in a rush?
In this world, we tend to see helping behavior as pretty black and white — the good people do the right thing and help those in need and the bad people just keep on walking. Research conducted by John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, in their paper From Jerusalem to Jericho: a study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior, demonstrated that whether we would stop and help someone in need has little to do with what kind of person we are and almost everything to do with situational factors, such as if we’re in a rush.
The researchers set out to test three hypotheses:
- Making helping behavior salient to the participant would not increase the likelihood of helping behavior.
- The more rushed a participant is, the less likely they are to help
- A person’s type of religiosity, meaning their belief system, has no effect on the person’s helping behaviors.
Testing began by giving participants personality tests to evaluate their religiosity. Then, they asked participants to report to the building next door to give a 3–5 minute public speech. To test the hypotheses, two manipulations were done. The first was the speech content. Participants were to either discuss the helping-relevant subject of The Parable of the Good Samaritan, which discusses a Good Samaritan compassionately helping someone who had been robbed, beaten and left by the side of the road, or the non-helping relevant topic of what jobs students can find. Next, they manipulated whether the person was in a rush to get to the next location.
As participants headed next door, they passed a “victim” coughing and groaning in the alleyway. The “victim” rated how helpful the participants were on a scale from 0–5, with 0 being failing to notice help was needed and 5 being saint-like persistent help that ensured the victim was alright. Then, participants completed a personal and social ethics questionnaire with questions like, “when was the last time you encountered someone in need?” The goal of this assessment was to confirm the participants viewed the “victim” as someone who needed help to validate that they had made a conscious decision about whether they would stop and help.
Overall, 40% of the participants offered at least some kind of aid to the victim. All three of the above hypotheses were supported. This means a person could have strong ethical and moral views and actually be about to give a speech about helping a stranger lying on the side of the road and still not help a stranger lying in an alleyway if they were in a rush– talk about not practicing what you preach!
If helping behavior, which really appears motivated by a person’s character, is actually driven by situational factors, I wonder what else in our lives could be primarily driven by situational factors.
References
Darley J.M., Batson C.D., From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variable in helping behavior. (1973) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 27(1), 100–108
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