Prologue
Why Did No One Help?
Hartford, Connecticut, police released a chilling video of a
78-year-old man trying to cross a street with a carton of milk.
He steps off the curb just as two cars
that appear to be racing
swerve on the wrong side of the street. The fi rst car swerves
around the man. The second car hits him and throws him into
the air like a doll, then speeds away.
What follows is even more chilling: People walk by. Nine
vehicles pass him lying in the street. Some drivers slow down
to look but drive away.
Angel Arce Torres lies in the street for more than a minute
before a police car arrives. He died a year later from injuries
sustained in the accident (Brown, 2008, p. E5; Owens, 2009)
Looking
Ahead
Why didn’t any passersby help the 78-year-old Torres? Did they
not notice him? Or did they simply decide not to bother?
Whatever
the reason, they off ered no help to him, and he
sustained serious injuries.
If Torres’s experience were an isolated incident, we might be
able to attribute the bystanders’ inaction to something particular
about the situation or to the specifi c people involved. However,
events such as this one are all too common.
In one infamous case, a woman named Kitty Genovese was
attacked by a man near an
apartment building in Queens, New
York. At one point during the assault, which lasted 30 minutes,
she managed to free herself and screamed, “Oh, my God, he
stabbed me. Please help me!” In the stillness of the night, no
fewer than 38 neighbors heard her screams. Windows opened,
and lights went on. One couple pulled chairs up to the window
and turned off the lights so that they could see better. Someone
called out, “Let that girl alone.” But shouts were not enough to
scare off the killer. He chased Genovese, stabbing her eight more
times, and sexually molested her before leaving her to die. And
how many of those 38 witnesses came to her aid? As in Torres’s
case, not one person helped (Rogers & Eftimiades, 1995).
Such incidents remain dismaying—and perplexing. Why don’t
bystanders
intervene in such situations, particularly when there
are many of them who could potentially off er help? At the time
of the Kitty Genovese murder, editorial writers suggested that
the incidents could be attributed to the basic shortcomings of
“human nature,” but such an assumption is woefully inadequate.
Many people have risked their own lives to help others in
dangerous situations, and so “human nature” encompasses a
wide range of both negative and positive responses.
Psychologists puzzled over the problem for many years. After
much research they reached an unexpected conclusion:
Kitty
Genovese probably would have been better off if only a few
people, rather than many, had heard her cries for help. In fact,
if only one bystander had been present, the chances that this
person would have intervened might have been fairly high. It
turns out that the fewer the witnesses to an assault, the better
the victim’s chances of getting help.
How did psychologists come to such a curious conclusion?
After all, logic and common sense clearly suggest that more
bystanders would produce a greater
likelihood that someone
would help a person in need. This seeming contradiction—and
the way psychologists resolved it—illustrates a central challenge
for the fi eld of psychology: asking useful questions about the
unknown, and getting valid answers.
Like professionals in any science, psychologists are vitally
concerned with refi ning and expanding knowledge within their
fi eld. In the following modules we’ll see how psychologists pose
questions of interest and answer them through scientifi c research.
We will fi nd that the answers psychologists obtain from their
research not only advance our understanding
of behavior but
also off er the potential to improve the human condition.
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“Birds of a feather fl ock together”. . . or “Opposites attract”? “Two heads are better
than one”. . . or “If you want a thing done well, do it yourself”? “The more the
merrier”. . . or “Two’s company, three’s a crowd”?
If we were to rely on common sense to understand behavior, we’d have consid-
erable diffi culty—especially because commonsense views are often contradictory. In
fact, one of the major undertakings for the fi eld of psychology is to develop sup-
positions about behavior and to determine which of those suppositions are accurate.
Psychologists—as well as scientists in other disciplines—meet the challenge of pos-
ing appropriate questions and properly answering them by
relying on the scientifi c
method. The
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