Why People Don't Help

It was a hard murder to forget. Thirty-eight people passively watched as a man stalked, stabbed and killed Kitty Genovese, 28, in the predawn darkness of the Kew Gardens section of New York City five years ago. All heard her screams; none came to her aid. Since then, the paralysis of the innocent by stander has spurred psychologists to in vestigate man's unfortunate proclivity for playing the Bad Samaritan.

Why do people fail to help their fellow man? Fear, apathy and indifference are not quite the answer. Instead, the scientists' experiments show that the average citizen's instinctive concern for his fellow human beings is too often restrained by a taut, subtle web of social pressures. Particularly in groups and crowds, write John M. Darley of Prince ton and Bibb Latane of Ohio State in a recent and already classic report, "un til someone acts, no one acts."

Seeping Smoke. Even the act of seeing an emergency is surprisingly difficult, Darley and Latane point out.

"Americans consider it bad manners to look too closely at other people in public," the scientists write, "and are embarrassed if caught doing otherwise."

What people do see is often ambiguous.

Smoke seeping from a building may mean a fire or a broken steam pipe; a man sprawling in a doorway may be having a heart attack, or may be just sleeping off a bender. In trying to decide whether a situation is critical, the researchers say, "a person often looks at those around him to see how he should react himself. In general, it is considered embarrassing to look overly concerned, to seem flustered, to 'lose your cool.' A crowd can thus force inaction on its members by implying, through its passivity and apparent indifference, that an event is not an emergency."

In one experiment conducted by Latane and another colleague, college students in a waiting room heard a tape recording that simulated the sounds of a woman climbing onto a chair to reach a stack of papers. She fell, injured her ankle, and began to moan, "Oh my God --my foot! I . . . can't get this thing off me." Seventy percent of the people who were waiting by themselves offered help; with another person in the waiting room, only 20% showed their concern.

Even without group pressure, notes Stanford Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, people will rarely intervene in an interfamily situation for fear of violating a social code. Husbands and wives can literally beat each other to death before most outsiders will step in; recent studies of the estimated more than 30,000 "battered children" injured by parental abuse every year indicate that as many as 4,000,000 people were familiar with at least one such case of family violence and that most of them did nothing.

Helping others is not encouraged by law, as many people are aware. In most states, good Samaritans who intervene can be sued for their trouble and must bear the cost of any injuries they may suffer. Helpers weighing the possible risks of intervening are also concerned about losing their freedom, says University of Wisconsin Psychologist Leonard Berkowitz. When one person helps another, says Berkowitz, the helper almost inevitably feels that he has come under the sway of the person whom he is assisting.

What kind of a man surmounts these constraints? One rather circular answer is a man who sees someone else do it. Northwestern University's James H. Bryan discovered that the proportion of people who stopped to aid a woman driver struggling with a flat tire increased if they passed another woman farther back who was already getting help. Columbia Teachers College Psychologist Harvey Hornstein has experimentally "lost" 500 wallets around New York City during the past two years. His studies show that finders who think that others have been helpful in similar situations are most likely to mail the wallet back.

The nature of altruism itself is the topic of increasingly sophisticated research: eventually, they may reveal how more people can be encouraged to leave the crowd and take the crucial first helpful step. Meanwhile, Latane and Darley contend that being aware of these antisocial pressures is the first step toward resisting them. Thus prepared, they contend, "we can choose to see distress and step forward to relieve it."

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