This is a really intersting study that was done ke! Who Wouldn't Help A Lost Child? You, Maybe. by Harold Takooshian, Sandra Haber, and David Lucido Psychology Today, 1977 A lost child is one of the world’s saddest sights. There he stands on the street, looking around hopefully, his lips trembling, and his eyes startling to fill with tears. It's enough to break your heart. But is it enough to make you stop and help? Suppose the child asks you to make a phone call for him. Would you do it? Conventional wisdom has it that city dwellers don't help other the way folks do in small towns. They just don't want to get involved. Most people seem to believe this, based on their own experiences and a number of well-publicized incidents such as the 1964 tape murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City. She died while 38 people stood by and watched. Despite this general belief in city callousness, little research has been done directly comparing helping behavior in cities and towns. Even the classic 1970 work by psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley (The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help?) didn't deal with the question directly. Through an ingenious series of experiments, Latane and Darley discovered that the more people at the scene of an emergency, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. This "diffusion of responsibility," as they called it, inhibited even well-intentioned bystanders from taking action. When Darley and Latane compared the bystanders who helped with those who didn't, they found only one characteristic that distinguished between the two groups: the size of their home town. The smaller the community in which an individual was raised, the more likely he was to help. Despite this, Latane and Darley concluded that the Genovese case and others like it could happen just as well in a small town, if a sufficiently large number of witnesses were around to share the irresponsibility. They based this belief strictly on what they observed in cities, since they didn't have the figures to compare what actually happened in communities of various sizes. We set up a direct comparison by creating the same emergency situation in several large cities and small towns. Since a lost child is likely to arouse sympathy in almost any adult, we used children to create our emergency. A young child, six to ten years old, stood on a busy street lined with stores and spoke to the first stranger who passed by, saying, "I'm lost. Can you call my house?" If the person asked for more information, the child explained he had been shopping with his mother and that they had been separated. The child acted frightened, and showed the stranger an identification card with his family's phone number. Fourteen different children played the lost child. Some were boys, some were girls; some were black, some were white. They asked for help in midtown Manhattan, on the Boston Commons, at City Hall in Philadelphia, in the Loop in Chicago, and in 12 smaller towns around these cities. An observer stood nearby to insure the child's safety and to record the stranger's sex, race, apparent age, and exactly what he or she said. The observer also noted how many people were in the immediate vicinity where they could hear the child's request, and how many were in the general area. The child's mother or guardian also stayed nearby, out of sight. If the stranger refused to help, the child waited a minute and asked another person. If the stranger took the child to a nearby phone or started to help in some other way, the mother or guardian intervened. She ran up, called the child by name and thanked the person warmly for helping. Before starting the experiment, we tested the lost child method in several locations. Several colleagues warned us that the approach might not work, since practically everyone would offer to help the child. It didn't take long to disprove this prediction. The first person nine year old Jackie approached in a Brooklyn shopping center, two days before Christmas, ignored her. The second snapped, "So what's your problem, kid? I'm lost too." We were sufficiently shaken that we decided to quit after one more futile attempt that day. Clearly, helping a child was not an automatic response, at least not for three Brooklynites fighting the Christmas rush. During the experiment, the children asked 184 people for help, 127 in the cities and 57 in the towns. The results were clear. In the cities, 46 percent offered help; in the towns, 72 percent This is a big difference, quantitatively, but the differences in the kind of help offered were even more striking. In the towns, even the 16 individuals who didn't help were usually sympathetic. Only three of them simply said no and walked on. The others offered excuses for not helping or suggested ways the child could find his mother. In the cities, 52 of the 69 who refused did so abruptly. They ignored the child by walking past, swerving, sidestepping, shaking their head "no," and on two occasions, pulling themselves out of the child's grasp. Others, almost without breaking stride, put money into the child's hand B a dime, a quarter, even a dollar bill B and sped on their way. The strangest response was offered by an elderly man walking along Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. He stopped and spoke with the child, patted him, shook his head "no," hesitantly, and crossed the street. There he waited behind a lamppost, craning his neck to observe the child. He watched for 15 minutes while others refused to help, until one woman finally stopped and offered aid. Then he left his post and went on his, way. At other times, passersby referred the child to someone else for help, or suggested, "Here's a dime the call yourself." One New Yorker solved his problem, if not the child's by saying confidently, "Go into that restaurant. Your mother's waiting for you there." While the usual city response was cold, there were some striking exceptions. Five or six passersby responded much like Judy, a Manhattanite who treated young Ann like a long lost daughter. Judy, introduced herself by name, comforted Ann, asked if she were hungry, and offered to buy her lunch before escorting her home in a taxi. In another instance, one helpful stranger asked a second passerby for aid, and both then asked a third. Within a few moments the child was invisible in the center of a nine person rescue committee. If the experimenter hadn't broken through to get the child, there is no telling how large the helpful but indecisive group would have grown. We also looked at the factors other than the city-town difference which might have influenced the results: weather, time of the year, day of the week, hour of the day, the child's sex, age or race, the stranger's sex, age of race. None of them made much difference. We did find wide variations in the behavior among people in the fours cities. The comparatively few persons studied in each city makes it unfair to generalize but these are the results: Bostonians and Philadelphians reacted similarly. Two-thirds refused to help; one-third helped. In New York, the split was half and half. And in Chicago, two-thirds offered to help, nearly as many as in the smaller communities. Chicagoans were not only the most helpful; they also offered help in an unusual way, by calling the police. In the other cities, fewer than 10 percent of the helpful strangers did this. In Chicago, 35 percent of the helpers ignored the nearby phone and, instead, flagged down a patrol car or went looking for s patrolman. Psychologist Stanley Milgram and other urban theorists have referred to such behavior as an "institutionalized response." City dwellers learn to refer responsibilities such as picking up litter, intervening in crime, or handling other social problems to the authorities But why did Chicago people look for a policeman so much more frequently than New Yorkers, Bostonians, or Philadelphians? Mayor Daley's city has long had the reputation of a strong police city, an image reinforced by the turbulence of the 1968 Democratic convention there. Perhaps this explains its citizens' "call-a-cop" response. One of us had a chance to speak to an off-duty Chicago policeman about our study. Without knowing what we'd found, he volunteered that, "Of course people should refer a lost child to a policeman. They aren't supposed to get involved. It=s for the police to take care of." Our results were clear. Helping was the rule in towns, and the exception in cities. This leaves the question, "Why?" One answer is the Darley-Latane diffusion of responsibility theory mentioned earlier, the more people are around the less likely any of them will help. This idea takes individuals of the hook by explaining their actions largely in terms of the situation rather than their personal choice. If this were the main force at work during our experiment, the lost child should have received more help when there were fewer people around. This didn't happen. The child was about as likely to be helped whether the stranger was on a nearly deserted street or in a teeming shopping area. We prefer an explanation that focuses on the individual, a theory of adaptation suggested by other studies of urban behavior. This research shows that city people adjust to the constant demands of urban life by reducing their involvement with others. There is so much going on that the city dweller learns to ignore the constant demands on his time, his attention, and his frazzled nervous system. He forgoes common courtesies, such as saying "Hello" on the street, refuses to do favor for strangers, and even ignores a child's plea for help. A recent book by Albert Seedman, the detective who investigated the Genovese murder, offers new information that might alter the way psychologists look at the incident. He found that one of the 38 bystanders had a clear, close-up view of the murder; it took place on the landing directly below his apartment door. He knew the victim personally, and yet he remained alone in his apartment for several hours, without telephoning the police. This inaction is hard to explain by diffusion of responsibility. Latane has observed that, "Perhaps if there had been fewer than 38 witnesses present .... Kitty Genovese might be alive today." Our lost child experiment suggests otherwise. It would have been better; it seems to us, if there had been many more bystanders. This would have increased the chance that at least one of them had just arrived from a small town, and was not yet accustomed to hearing or ignoring screams for help. He would probably have acted, and perhaps save her life.