The Subway Samaritan

The Subway Samaritan A man slumps in a doorway and lies there unattended as pedestrians scurry past. A child is beaten unconscious while residents in adjoining apartments turn a deaf ear to his shrieks. Six years ago, Kitty Genovese, 28, was stabbed to death in New York City while 38 of her neighbors, roused by her screams, watched or listened and did nothing. Such incidents feed the popular notion, especially in big cities, that the average citizen is not prepared to go to the aid of his fellow man.

Now this pessimistic view has been challenged in a recently published study, "Good Samaritanism: An Underground Phenomenon?" by Psychologists Irving M. and Jane Allyn Piliavin of the University of Pennsylvania and Judith Rodin of Columbia University. Based on experiments conducted by four teams of Columbia students in that grimy citadel of public indifference, the New York City subway system, the study finds that "people do, in fact, help with rather high frequency." The experiments, carried on over a period of 73 days, sought to determine in a realistic setting how a captive audience reacts to a person obviously ill, and another plainly drunk, and whether these responses differ with the victim's race.*

A team composed of a "victim," a model who was to come to the victim's aid if there was no response, and two women observers boarded an Eighth Avenue express. The victim, wearing an Eisenhower jacket and old slacks, stood near a pole in the center of the coach. He carried a cane if he was playing an invalid; if feigning drunkenness, he smelled of liquor and carried a bottle tightly wrapped in a brown paper bag. After the train departed the station, the victim suddenly staggered, collapsed and lay on the floor.

Sticky Problem. "The frequency of help received by the victims was impressive," write the psychologists. "The victim with the cane received spontaneous help on 62 of the 65 trials. Even the drunk received help on 19 of 38 trials." In fact, some passengers were so solicitous in helping the victim out of the train, remaining with him at the station or insisting on finding him an ambulance, that getting on with the next trial became a sticky problem.

Help for the ill man was offered about evenly from blacks and whites, but those who risked trouble to come to the aid of the drunk tended most often to be of his race. Only 10% of those offering spontaneous help were women, who tended to rationalize their inaction with comments like 'Tm not strong enough."

In at least one important respect, the findings of this study collide with the now classic report by John M. Darley of Princeton and Bibb Latane of Ohio State. Working under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, Darley and Latane found that a bystander is less likely to help in a group than when he is alone. A crowd, they concluded, tends to diffuse responsibility and makes it easier for the individual to do nothing. The Piliavins and Mrs. Rodin cautiously dispute this theory. They contend that under real-life conditions the average person--even in a group--will act when he clearly sees that another human being is in trouble.

*Of the four victims repeatedly used, three were white.

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