Piliavin

• Name of Researcher and Date: Piliavin et al and 1969
• Title of Study: Subway Samatarians
• One assumption of the Social Approach:

  Behaviour, cognitions and emotions are influenced by social contexts, social environment and groups.
• One Assumption of the Social Approach:

  Behaviour, cognitions and emotions are influenced by the actual, implied or imagined presence of others
• Aims of the Study:

  • To test the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis in a real-life setting 
  • To look at the effect of the type and race of the victim on the speed of helping, frequency of responding and the race of the helper
  • To look at the effects of modelling on emergency situations
  • To examine the relationship between the size of the group, and the frequency and latency of helping response with a face-to-face victim.
• Hypotheses:

  1. An individual would be more inclined to help someone of his race than a person of another race
  2. Regarding the type of victim: help would be given more frequently and rapidly to the apparently ill victim
  3. Whatever sympathy individuals may experience when they observe a drunk collapse, their inclination to help him will be reduced by the realisation that the victim may become disgusting, embarrassing, and/or violent (cost-reward matrix)
• Independent Variable:

  1. Type of victim - drunk or ill
  2. Race of victim - black or white 
  3. Behaviour of a model - close or distant, early or late 
  4. Size of the group of bystanders in the subway carriage
• Dependent Variable (checklist, how it was measured):

  1. Frequency of helping
  2. Speed of helping 
  3. Race of helped
  4. Sex of helper
• Methodology: Field Experiment
• Strengths of Field Experiments:

  • Minimises Demand Characteristics
• Weaknesses of Field Experiments:

  • Not controlled (you can only have a limited amount of controls)
  • Difficult to replicate it
• Composition of the train:

  • The mean number of people per carriage was 43
  • The mean number of people in the "critical area," (the area the ‘incident’ took place) was 8.5
• Sampling Technique: Opportunistic sampling
• Research Design: Independent design
• Results for the Ill victims:

  • In all but three of the “cane” situation model trials, the victim received help before the model was due to help (62 out of the 65 trials). 
  • In the “drunk” situation, the victim received help in 19 out of the 38 trials. 
  • Spontaneous help before 70 secs had lapsed in the model trials was therefore more likely in the “cane” situation. 
  • Men were more likely to help than women.
  • There was no difference between the help given to the white and black victims in the ill situation.
• Results for the Drunk victims:

  • The “drunk” black victim was the only one who was more likely to receive help from someone of his own ethnicity. 
  • The victims received help in 81/103 trials, and in 60% of these cases the help was received from more than one person. In fact, once the first person had moved to help, two or three others often followed quite quickly. 
  • The longer the victim went without help, the more likely were travellers to move away from the area or to verbally justify their non-intervention.
• Conclusions drawn from the Study:

  • More assistance was given, and more quickly than would have been suggested by Darley and Latané’s “diffusion of responsibility” hypothesis. 
  • However, this was a public face-to-face situation, which was different from the lab studies previously run. 
• Conclusion drawn from the Study:

  • Piliavin et al. suggest a negative-state relief model that explains why people help and, alternatively, why people move away or justify their behaviour. This would also explain why fewer women help: in all cases the victim was a man and sometimes “drunk”. It would be difficult for a woman to lift and assist a man who has collapsed, and potentially risky to assist a drunk man.
• How can this information be used:

  • It tells us the specific situational factors that may make bystanders more likely to help such as, same race or same-sex. We can also learn that an individual is more likely to be offered help if they do not intimidate, embarrass, or disgust the helper.
• Altruism - Doing a good deed without getting any reward
• Bystander Apathy - The tendency not to help when witnessing a scene that requires help or invention. Could results in pluralistic ignorance.
• Cost-Reward analysis: Proposes that a person's distress leads to potential helpers' physiological arousal.
• Diffusion of responsibility - Occurs when there are multiple bystanders present, leading individuals to believe that someone else will take action.
• Ecological Validity - Does it occur in real life? A measure of how test performance predicts behaviours in real-world settings.
• Emotional Arousal - A state of heightened physiological activity.
• Pluralistic Ignorance - When people think that they feel or think differently from other members of the group
• Ethnocentrism - Believe your own ethnicity is the best one
• Critical Area - Where the victim collapses
• What they did - features :

  • 1 victim - 4 male victims (3 white, 1 black, aged 26-35)
  • 1 model - 4 male models (all white, aged 24-29)
  • 2 observers - 8 female observers
• Condition 1

  Critical early: model in the same carriage as victim and helps 70 seconds after falling over.
• Condition 2

  Critical late: model in same carriage as victim and helps 150 seconds after falling over
• Condition 3

  Adjacent early: model in adjacent carriage to victim and helps 70 seconds after falling over
• Condition 4

  Adjacent late: model in adjacent carriage to victim and helps 150 seconds after falling over.
• Observer 1 Roles:

  • Recorded the number of people in the car and the race, sex and location of every passenger in the critical area. She also noted how many people assisted the victim as well as their race, sex and location.
• Observer 2

  Recorded the race, sex and location of passengers in the adjacent area, as well as the time taken to assist after the collapse

  • Both observers noted comments made by passengers and also tried to elicit them. 

  E.g. ‘It’s for men to help him’, ‘I wish I could help him - I’m not strong enough’, ‘I never saw this kind of thing before - I don’t where to look’, ‘You feel so bad that you don’t know what to do’
• Controls used in the Study:

  • Same 7.5 minute train journey for all trials
  • Victims wore the same clothes and fell over at the same time (after 70 seconds) in the same place and in the same way on every trial.
  • Each team member started the journey in the same place (e.g. observer 1 in the adjacent carriage near the exit door and observer 2 in the adjacent carriage in the far corner).
  • All trials were run only on the same subway which serviced the 8th Avenue line since they had two-person seats in group arrangement rather than extended seats. 
• Psychology Investigated

  • Bystander apathy -this was triggered after the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 - the lack of help offered in such situations
  • Bystanders - are people who are physically present at the scene of an event or incident but do not take an active part in helping others in need
• Psychology Investigated

  • Diffusion of Responsibility - when an incident is observed by more than one person there may be a diffusion of responsibility - the more people that are present the less personal responsibility each individual feels
• Details about the Participants:

  • About 4,450 men and women (45% black and 55% white)
  • 8th Avenue line
  • Weekdays between 11:00am and 3:00pm
  • April 15 - June 26, 1968
• Strengths of the Study:

  • Quantitative Data -allowed the researchers to objectively compare helping behaviours between drunk and cane conditions - e.g. the time taken for a victim to receive help was recorded - minimises researcher bias
  • Qualitative Data - allowed for further insight into bystanders' justifications for lack of helping behaviour - e.g many women said 'I wish I could help him - I'm just not strong enough' - allowed Piliavin to draw a more meaningful conclusion