Methods of Persuasion: How to Use Psychology to Influence Human Behavior by Nick Kolenda Page B

Those questions led a pair of social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané, to explore the latter possibility (Darley & Latané, 1968).
    Imagine that you just arrived to participate in a study, and the experimenter explains that you’ll be talking to other participants about personal issues via an intercom (because the topics were personal, the intercom would help preserve anonymity). The experimenter even says that he won’t be listening over the intercom because he wants to spark genuine conversation, so he mentions that he will only listen to the recording later. But to help keep the conversations organized, only one person will be able to speak into the intercom at a given moment. When someone is done talking, they can then press a button to give another person control of the microphone.
    So there you are. You’re seated in your own private room, waiting for the other participants to join you over the intercom (for this trial, you’re told that you’ll only be talking with one other person). Once the other participant joins you, you both start talking about some personal issues. At some point in the discussion, the other person embarrassingly admits that he found it difficult to adjust to college life because he experiences occasional seizures. Albeit interesting and heartfelt, that statement doesn’t really faze you until a specific moment later in the discussion.
    After the two of you have been talking for a while, the other person is in the middle of talking when he says:
I-er-um-I think I-I need-er-if-if could-er-er-somebody . . . I-uh-I’ve got a-a one of the-er-sei er-cr-things coming on [choking sounds] . . . I’m gonna die-er-er-I’m . . . gonna die-er-help-er-er-seizure-er-[chokes, then quiet] (Darley & Latané, 1968, p. 379)
    Gulp. Being the only person aware of this potential seizure, what would you do? Would you go find help? Of course you would. And that’s what happened in the experiment. When people knew that they were the only person aware of the seizure, nearly everyone immediately left the room to seek help.
    But something dangerously interesting happened when people believed that more participants were part of the intercom discussion. In addition to testing 2-person discussions, the researchers sometimes played recordings of other people over the intercom to make it seem like other people were participating in the discussion. Some people were led to believe that they were participating in groups of either 3 or 6 people. What the researchers found shed light on the tragedy with Kitty Genovese.
    When people believed that the discussions included more people, their likelihood of helping dropped dramatically. When people believed that they were the only person speaking to the seizure-prone participant, 85 percent of people left immediately to seek help. However, that percentage dropped to 62 percent in 3-person groups, and it dropped even further to 31 percent in 6-person groups. With more people present, the less people felt the need to actively seek help. We would rather listen to someone having a terrible seizure than to seek help.
    Why are we so heartless? It’s not that we’re heartless, but rather, it’s because we succumb to two main psychological forces that lower our tendency to help when there are more people present:
     
Diffusion of Responsibility. In the experiment with the supposed seizure, nearly everyone sprung to action when they believed that they were the only person aware of the seizure because all responsibility rested on their shoulders. When they believed that more people were part of the discussion, however, responsibility was diffused across those people. With more people present, the less responsibility each individual felt because they assumed that someone else would seek help. With the 38 bystanders near Kitty Genovese’s death, they could all hear the rape and murder from inside their apartments, but no one sprung to action and called 911 because they