How your situation influences your goodness

How environmental features influence our behavior is, of course, a huge topic; but here are three particularly interesting experiments. The upshot is that how helpful people will be to strangers varies widely with seemingly minor events.

1: Mathews and Canon (1975: 574-5) found subjects were five times more likely to help an apparently injured man who had dropped some books when ambient noise was at normal levels than when a power lawnmower was running nearby (80 per cent v. 15 per cent).

2: Darley and Batson (1973: 105) report that passers-by not in a hurry were six times more likely to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress than were passers-by in a hurry (63 per cent v. 10 per cent).

3: Isen and Levin (1972: 387) discovered that people who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than those who did not find a dime (88 per cent v. 4 per cent).

Kind of makes you want to leave dimes for people to find, doesn't it? Actually, my favorite thing to do is to tuck a dollar bill behind some napkins in restaurant napkin dispensers.

To these studies I would also like to add my own anecdotal report. Several years ago I remember the news reporting that a homeless woman was giving birth in the stairway of the Downtown Berkeley BART station as hundreds of commuters passed without stopping (until an Oakland school teacher stopped to help get her to a nearby hospital). Why did no one stop? Probably some combination of being habituated to ignore those who appear homeless, being in a hurry, and the social distance they perceived between the woman and themselves.

Failing to help someone in acute distress (when doing so would be easy for you) is often presented as the paradigm of immorality; for example, simply walking past a child drowning in a shallow pond. Yet clearly many factors influence whether or not people will act.

The three studies were published in:

Mathews, K. E., and Cannon, L. K. (1975). ‘Environmental Noise Level as a Determinant of
Helping Behavior’ . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32: 571-7

Isen, A. M., and Levin, P. F. (1972). ‘Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and
Kindness’ . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21:384-8

Darley, J. M., and Batson, C. D. (1973). ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior’ . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27:100-8.

I found all three in an interesting book chapter (though I'm not sure what book as I found it online):

Doris, J. M., and Stich, S. P.. 'As A Matter of Fact: Emperical Perspectives on Ethics'