Elephants on Acid (28 page)

You settle into your chair, thinking about what you want to say. Just then the voice of another participant crackles through the headphones, “Hi everyone. I guess it’s my turn first.”

He sounds like a pleasant, slightly nervous young man. He describes some of the challenges he’s faced adjusting to big-city life. One particular problem, he confesses with evident discomfort, is that under conditions of stress, such as exams, he’s prone to seizures. His two minutes end, and the microphone of the next person turns on. The discussion proceeds like this through the entire group, until your turn arrives. You talk about difficulties with your roommates, and about the pressures of balancing work and social life. Then your turn is over, and the microphone of the first guy switches on again.

He begins to talk, but abruptly his voice grows louder and his words start to slur. He seems to be having some kind of problem:

“I-er-um-I think I-I need-er-if-if could-er-er-somebody er-er-er-er-er-er-er give me a little-er-give me a little help here because-er-I-er-I’m-er-erh- h-having a-a-a real problem-er-right now and I-er-if somebody could help me out it would-it would-er-er s-s-sure be-sure be good . . .”

“My God,” you think. “He’s having a seizure.” Thoughts race through your mind. “He needs help. Should I tell the experimenters? Has someone else already told them?” As you ponder these questions, you continue to hear the young man’s agonized plea in your headphones.

“If somebody would-er-give me a little h-help-uh-er-er-er-er-er c-could somebody-er-er-help-er-uh-uh-uh.”

Your heart rate accelerates. Someone has to help him! But another part of your mind restrains you—surely others have already rushed to his aid. You would look silly arriving last on the scene. You would only get in the way.

You hear choking sounds. “I’m gonna die-er-er-I’m . . . gonna die-er-help-er-er-seizure-er.” You feel simultaneously panicked and useless. All you can think is, “What should I do? What should I do?”

In 1968 this scene replayed thirteen different times at Columbia University. Each time a single, bewildered listener struggled to decide whether to rush out and help the young man, or wait for someone else to do so.

What these people didn’t know was that there was no medical emergency. Nor were they involved in a roundtable discussion about student life. The sound of the man having a seizure, as well as the voices of the other participants, came from a tape recorder. By volunteering to participate in the discussion of problems associated with college life, they had become guinea pigs in John Darley and Bibb Latané’s “bystander intervention in emergencies” experiment.

Darley and Latané were investigating the curious phenomenon of unresponsive bystanders—how it is that crowds of people can watch as an emergency unfolds, without a single person stepping forward to help. The direct inspiration for their experiment was the widely reported 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. As Genovese returned to her apartment at three a.m., she was attacked outside her building by a man with a knife. He stabbed her repeatedly and raped her as she screamed for help. This went on for half an hour. Lights came on in the apartments above. People came to their windows to see what all the noise was about. But no one came to her aid.

Genovese’s murder caused a public outcry. The people who did nothing were condemned as apathetic and heartless. But Darley and Latané suspected individual psychology had little to do with the witnesses’ lack of response. Instead, they suspected group psychology was to blame. They devised their experiment to prove this.

They led subjects to believe they were either part of a two-person discussion group, or (as depicted in the scene above) a six-person group. In the two-person condition, subjects invariably ran out of the room to alert the experimenters as soon as the young man began to experience the seizure. They knew they had to do something because—so they believed—no one else was able to hear his cries. But subjects behaved very differently in the six-person condition. Now they hesitated before acting. They sat passively, agonizing about what to do, wondering if someone else was going to help. Thirty-eight percent of the subjects never left the room. Just like the witnesses of Kitty Genovese’s murder, they became unresponsive bystanders.

The phenomenon the experiment demonstrated is called “diffusion of responsibility.” When people in groups witness an emergency, they tend to look around and think, “Someone else will help.” No one feels directly responsible. And, consequently, no one does anything.

When Darley and Latané published their results in 1968, the scientific community hailed the experiment as a classic study. In the decades since then, other researchers have
⁷¹
extended their work in many ways, staging fake emergencies, including robberies, kidnappings, women being attacked, subway passengers collapsing and drooling blood from their mouths, and men gushing blood from arterial wounds. Any shocking emergency you can think of has probably been simulated somewhere by a social psychologist for the benefit of a horrified crowd.

These studies have taught us a great deal about group psychology and the phenomenon of diffusion of responsibility. But they have had an unintended consequence, because in addition to unresponsive bystanders we now also have to worry about skeptical ones. This was revealed during a 1986 experiment conducted by Robert MacCoun and Norbert Kerr. The two researchers were staging a mock trial. Suddenly a psychology student playing the part of a jury member had a grand mal epileptic seizure—
for real
. But many of the people in the room, familiar with Latané and Darley’s study, thought it was just part of the experiment. Even when the paramedics arrived, many were still convinced the student was acting. Luckily the seizure victim did get help and everything turned out fine. But what this incident demonstrates is that if you ever do need help in a crowded place—perhaps you trip and break your leg on a busy street—there’s a real danger you may bleed to death before anyone realizes you’re not just playing a part in a weird psychology experiment.

We arrive at the end. Not the end of the book—not yet, at least. Rather, the end as the theme of this chapter.

Traditionally, there has been some tension between religion and science regarding matters of jurisdiction when the end arrives, whether we’re talking about the end of life or the end of the world. In the early days of experimentation, this dispute often came to a head in cemeteries. A priest would put bodies into the ground, and the grave robbers, paid by men of science, would haul them back out and cart them off to the medical labs. During the nineteenth century this practice became such a problem that many families held vigils at graves to prevent the bodies of their loved ones from being exhumed.

Nowadays it is not just the anatomy of the dead that scientists are curious about. Psychologists study how death motivates our actions in life, and pharmacologists explore how drugs can alter the process of dying. All of these studies are grouped together into the broad interdisciplinary field called thanatology—from the Greek word
Thanatos
, meaning death.

In a way, these studies represent the exact opposite of the Frankenstein experiments with which this book began. Those studies, despite the many corpses they featured, sought to understand the force of life. Here it is death—and the shadow it casts across our lives—that comes under the microscope.

A prop plane cruises through a clear blue sky. Onboard, passengers lean back in their seats. A few pull out books. Others stare out their windows, anticipating an uneventful flight. But suddenly the plane shudders violently and banks sharply to the left. One of the propellers stalls. The plane begins to spiral slowly downward as the pilot struggles to control it. The passengers hear him in the cockpit, shouting into the radio to the flight controllers on the ground, “We need to make an emergency landing! Repeat. An emergency landing!” People clutch the armrests of their seats so tightly their knuckles turn white. At the back of the plane, a woman starts screaming, “We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!”

How would you react in such an emergency? Would you remain calm, rationally assessing your best options for survival, or would you be the person screaming hysterically? For the U.S. Army, this question was of more than academic interest. The army needed to make sure soldiers kept their wits about them when bullets started to fly. So, in the early 1960s, it commissioned a team of psychologists—Mitchell Berkun, Hilton Bialek, Richard Kern, and Kan Yagi—to study the phenomenon of “behavioral degradation under psychological stress.” The army wanted to know how badly the performance of the average soldier suffered when he thought he was about to die, and whether there were techniques soldiers could learn to help them function more effectively in fear-arousing circumstances.

There’s really only one way to find out how people will behave in a life-and-death situation. You have to scare them into believing their lives are in danger—or, as the researchers put it in the dry language of science, you have to effect “the experimental arousal of fear of death.” Soldiers going through basic training at the Hunter Liggett Military Reservation in central California became the subjects. Naturally, none of the soldiers were briefed that the terrifying events they would soon experience were part of an experiment. That would have ruined the effect.

The first fear-arousing situation the researchers dreamed up was a flying laboratory of terror. Groups of soldiers were taken aloft in a small propeller plane. When it reached cruising altitude, the plane suddenly lurched and the propeller stalled. Over their headsets the soldiers heard the pilot talking to the tower: “Something’s wrong. We have to make an emergency landing.” The plane circled to return to the airport, and the soldiers could see ambulances and fire trucks waiting down below. At this sight, a knot of fear must have formed in the men’s throats, but then the situation grew even worse. The pilot announced that the landing gear wouldn’t come down. He was going to have to attempt to ditch the plane in the ocean.

Having established the fear-arousing situation, the researchers next introduced a task to measure the soldiers’ ability to perform under pressure. Somewhat incongruously, the task was to fill out insurance forms. A steward distributed the paperwork, explaining it was a bureaucratic necessity that everyone fill it out—if they were all going to die, the army wanted to make sure it was covered for the loss. The forms were to be placed in a canister and jettisoned before the crash landing. Obediently, the soldiers leaned forward in their seats, pencils in hand, and set to work deciphering the legalese. “These forms are pretty hard to understand,” they probably thought to themselves. Perhaps they attributed the difficulty they were experiencing to the distraction of imminent death, but it was more than that. The forms had been purposefully written in a confusing manner. They were, as the researchers put it, “an example of deliberately bad human engineering.”

As soon as the men completed the forms, the pilot turned the plane around—
“This is your captain speaking. Just kidding about that emergency.”
Then he landed it safely.

The soldiers in the plane made a significantly greater amount of mistakes on the insurance forms than did a control group in a classroom on the ground who filled out the same forms, indicating the men felt stressed by the experience. But, disappointingly for the researchers who were hoping to produce a real scare, most of the men reported feeling merely “unsteady” during the incident. Perhaps filling out the forms actually calmed the men down by distracting them. Or maybe the plane needed to go into a nosedive to trigger a more dramatic reaction. A quarter of the subjects even figured out that the emergency was fake. Those with some flying experience realized something was fishy, but one soldier found a more direct clue: a note a subject in an earlier group had written on the back of an airsickness bag.

Unfazed, the researchers went back to the drawing board and devised three new situations. These all involved mishaps during a supposed “atomic-age warfare” exercise. Soldiers were driven out to remote rural outposts and dropped off alone. Their job, their commander told them, was to man a radio and notify headquarters should any planes fly overhead. Wearily, the soldiers prepared themselves for a long and boring day. But it didn’t stay boring for long.

As the men sat sweating in the one-hundred-degree heat, an announcement suddenly crackled over the radio. Each man heard one of three warnings, depending on which experimental group he had been assigned to. He heard either that an accident with radioactive material had resulted in dangerous fallout over his area, that a forest fire was surrounding his position, or that misdirected artillery fire was incoming. “This is not a drill,” headquarters emphasized. “Repeat. This is not a drill. Maneuvers have been cancelled. Radio in your position for immediate helicopter evacuation.”

When the men tried to comply with the order they discovered, to their dismay, that their transmitters had chosen that moment to stop working. As if aware of the problem, headquarters gave another order: “Soldier, fix your transmitter and radio in your position.” Fixing the radio was the task the experimenters had chosen to measure performance under pressure. On the outside of each radio was printed a wiring diagram that the men were supposed to consult to fix the instrument. However, the schematic was really “a visual pursuit subtest of the MacQuarrie Test of Mechanical Ability, revised to look like a wiring diagram.”

Of the three situations, the radiation warning provoked, by far, the least reaction from the soldiers. Perhaps because the threat was invisible, the men acted as if there was little to fear. The researchers noted that “They tended to react as though the injury, if any, had already been suffered and that the only question remaining was that of establishing contact with the Command Post.” In addition, many of the men appeared remarkably uninformed about the dangers of radiation. Evidently these young men had not paid enough attention in science class.