DOING WHAT’S RIGHT: WHEN POLICIES AND GUIDELINES ARE NOT ENOUGH
Monday, 14 December 1970, Campus of Princeton University, New Jersey. On this typically clear, cold winter day, behavioural scientists John Darley and Daniel Baston are preparing for what will be famously known in the future as the “Good Samaritan experiment”. Their goal is to understand what influences people’s likelihood of helping a stranger in distress, a quintessential ethical act. Is it their personality traits? What they had in mind? Or other situational factors? For this, they recruited about 50 students attending a theological seminary on the campus – future priests – split them in various experimental conditions and observed how they behaved.
In the first part of the experiment, it was explained to the students that they were participating in a study about their vocation. They were then asked to fill in motivation surveys and either read a passage of the Bible’s Good Samaritan parable (which is about whether various holy individuals choose to stop and help a hapless bystander), or a mundane job-related text. They were then asked to deliver a talk about what they just read to a small audience on the other side of the campus. To go there, they had to pass through a small alley where a ‘victim’ – an actor who was part of the study – was sitting slumped in a doorway, head-down, eyes closed and in obvious pain. As they were about to leave, the students were either told that they were going to be late and needed to hurry, needed to leave now, or had a bit of time ahead of them.
Jan-Mar 2020 Issue
Novartis