Book Reading #16 - Opening Skinner's Box

Author: Lauren Slater

CHAPTER 4: In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing

Summary

In this chapter, the author Lauren Slater talks about a horrific crime that occurred in New York in 1964. A woman was stabbed and raped by a man at 3am. The unfortunate thing was that there were witnesses but they did not intervene. After this incident, Darley and Latane conducted some studies at New York University to try to find out the reason why people did not intervene even though they had the opportunity and enough time to do so.

In one of the experiment, they interviewed college student. They put him in a room and made him believe that there were more students in other students, however, the voices of the other students were pre-recorded. One of the prerecorded tapes had a student having a seizure, the experimenters wanted to see what the college student would do. The results were surprising, only 31% of the students reacted when they knew that other students were also listening, i.e. when they were in a group, however, 85% of the people reacted and tried to seek help when they felt they were alone, and the only person knowing about the other person's seizure.

Discussion

From the experiments, it could be seen that people failed to take action when they were in group or when there were bystanders. People tend to believe that it's not their sole responsibility to help the person in need if they are in crowd. I think this is also one of the reasons why people try to be more violent when they are in crowd since they think that the entire crowd would be blamed.