ל The Darley-Batson Good Samaritan Experiment. I was up till 4:30 a.m. last night working on my chapter on Norms in Law and Economics for the Handbook of Law and Economics. Jeffrey Rachlinski's good article, "The Limits of Social Norms," Chicago-Kent Law Review, 74: 1537-1567 (2000), describes a number of good experiments, including Asch's Lines, Milgram's Shocks, and Darley-Batson's Good Samaritan.
Darley and Batson's experiment truly begins during the subjects' walk over to the
building to deliver their talk. All subjects passed a man who was slumped over against a
wall, apparently in need of assistance. The man was, in reality, a confederate of the
experimenters. As the subjects passed the confederate, he coughed twice and groaned. If
the subjects asked him if he needed help, he said no, but it appeared otherwise. The
subject of the sermon had no effect on the rate of helping. Whether the
experimenter instructed the subjects to hurry or not, however, mattered a great deal.
Subjects in a hurry were far less likely to stop and provide assistance than the other
subjects.
The results of the study are a stunning triumph of mundane features of a situation over
social norms. The subjects were, after all, not a random sample of Princeton
undergraduates who might lack a dedication to the social norm of helping those in need -
they were divinity students. The beliefs that these students doubtless held dear,
however, were easily manipulated from an instruction by an unknown experimenter to
hurry. Furthermore, even making the parable of the good Samaritan salient had no real
effect on the subjects relative to the instruction to hurry. A pro-social norm, it
seems, has the most effect when acting on the norm is convenient.
The subjects of this study were undergraduate divinity students at
Princeton University. Upon arrival to the experiment room, the subjects were told that
the study concerned the ability of divinity students to think quickly, on their feet as
it were, in preparation for a public speaking engagement. The experimenters told the
subjects that they would have to walk over to another building and give a talk to a
group of freshman divinity students. Half of the subjects were told to address
employment opportunities for divinity students after graduation, and the others were
told to discuss the parable of the good Samaritan. This manipulation was crossed with
another variable that proved critical - the subjects were told either that they were
already late for the talk and had to hurry, that they had just enough time to get to the
talk, or that they had a few extra minutes.
I hope evangelical divinity students, who unlike the liberal-church Princeton students
of the past fifty years are taught to actually take the Bible seriously, would react
differently, but I wouldn't bet too much on it.
This experiment is helpful in understanding the late-term abortion story of my
January 29 post where I comment that our value for human life or for babies isn't
all that great compared to our value for convenience, once we put aside social norms,
laws, and shame. A line that may or may not make it into the final version of my norms
chapter is "Most people have principles, but few people are principled."
The cite for the experiment is: John M. Darley & C. Daniel Batson, "From Jerusalem to Jericho": A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior, 27 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 100 (1973).
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