To discover the relationship between the help given and similarity, the experimenters repeated the study under a different set of circumstances. This time, the actor carried a “Support Nixon” sign, had short hair, didn’t sport the moustache, and lost the “hip garb” in favor of more conservative clothing (a sports shirt, slacks, and loafers). The only thing that didn’t change was the script—the experimenter and the actor went through exactly the same requests as before.
The two conditions yielded very different levels of help. When the actor looked like a peace protester, the peace protesters appeared to be Good Samaritans. Lots of them offered to help, with many going so far as to offer to finance the actor’s bus journey home. Some protesters even offered to drive the actor themselves or, when the protester had no money or car, to accompany the actor on a seven-mile walk to his home. The situation was very different when the actor was clean-shaven and conservatively dressed. Suddenly, the kindly peace protestors were far less willing to help. The need for assistance was exactly the same, but now the actor was one of “the opposition.”
The study illustrates a simple but powerful concept. We help people who are like us. Decades of experiments involving ketchup-covered students lying on the street asking for help have shown the same effect time and again. People are at their most altruistic when those in need are similar in age, background, and fashion sense. It all makes sense from an evolutionary viewpoint. People who look and behave like us are more likely than others to be genetically related to us, or at least from the same tribe, and so are seen as being more deserving of our goodwill.
My favorite experiment into this similarity effect, conducted by Joseph Forgas from Oxford University, examined the way different European drivers honked their car horns.
22
Forgas’s idea combined the three elements that underlie many quirky ideas; it was brilliant, simple, and slightly strange. He had a man and woman drive around Germany, France, Spain, and Italy in a gray VW Beetle. They drove through various towns of roughly the same size, and tried their best to be at the front of traffic when the traffic lights showed red. As the lights turned green, much to the annoyance of the drivers behind them, they simply sat in the car. Actually, that is not quite true. They carefully noted down how the driver directly behind them used his or her horn, including the time elapsed before the first honk, and the duration of honking. This was dangerous work. In a similar experiment conducted a few years before, several motorists had taken out their frustration by ramming the experimenters’ vehicles.
23
However, Forgas and his colleagues lived to tell the tale and, perhaps more important, analyze their data.
The Italians proved the most impatient, honking their horns, on average, after about five seconds. Next were the Spanish at about the six-second mark. The French came in at about seven seconds, and the Germans proved the most patient, at about seven and a half seconds.
In this initial part of the study, the experimenter had been keen to ensure that the motorists were not influenced by the nationality of the stationary drivers. For this reason, the Beetle carried a highly salient Australian insignia. According to the researchers, this “more or less satisfied the requirements of a generic ‘foreign’ car, representing a nation with a presumably neutral national stereotype.” In a second stage of the study, the team sneakily swapped the Australian insignia for a German one, and repeated the procedure. This time, the Italians, Spanish, and French all honked their horns much sooner, the Italians holding off for just three seconds and the Spanish and French venting their anger at about the four-second mark. In Germany, however, the situation was quite different. Here, almost eight seconds passed before honking started. Something as simple as an insignia had instigated feelings of similarity, or dissimilarity, and had a significant impact on the time before drivers started to hit their horns.
Cars—and more specifically, bumper stickers—figured in another study that illustrated the important role that similarity plays in our lives. The summer of 1969 saw a series of bloody encounters between the police and the Black Panther Party, the African American civil rights organization. Frances Heussenstamm was teaching a psychology course at the California State College during this period, and many of her black students mentioned that they were receiving a large number of traffic citations. Heussenstamm noticed that all these students had bumper stickers supporting the Black Panthers on their cars, and she wondered whether the citations were the result of police prejudice or poor driving.
24
Heussenstamm asked forty-five students with exemplary driving records to participate in an unusual experiment. The students were asked to put Panther Party bumper stickers on their vehicles. All the participants signed a statement saying that they would do nothing to attract the attention of the police, and their cars were carefully inspected and found to be in roadworthy condition. In addition, each morning the students made a pledge to drive safely. The first participant received a ticket for “incorrect lane change” within two hours of starting the experiment. The following day, five more participants received citations for minor offenses, such as “following too closely” and “driving too slowly.” The participants paid their fines in person after receiving the citations, and one participant received his second citation on the way to paying his fine for the first one. Within three weeks, the group received a total of thirty-three citations, whereupon the experiment had to be terminated because Heussenstamm ran out of money to pay for the fines. Heussenstamm reports that when she announced the end of the study “the remaining drivers expressed relief and went straight to their cars to remove the stickers.” Although the design of the study was far from perfect (Heussenstamm suggests that future work should involve a second group of participants driving around with the bumper sticker “America—Love It or Leave It”), the results illustrate how something as simple as a bumper sticker has a large impact on whether people help or hinder others, even when it is their job to be fair and impartial.
Jerry Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University in California, and his colleagues wondered whether people would take the similarity principle way too far. Could they, for example, be persuaded to help a stranger because the two of them shared a completely meaningless symbol of similarity—the same date of birth? Burger and his team had volunteers visit his laboratory on the pretense of taking part in an experiment on astrology.
25
The experimenter introduced the volunteer to a second participant (an actor working with the experimenter), and handed each a form. The front page of the form asked for various personal details, including name and date of birth. On 50 percent of occasions, when the genuine participant completed his or her date of birth, the actor surreptitiously noted it and then filled in the same date on his own form. For the other 50 percent, the actor deliberately wrote in a different date.
The experimenter then asked “volunteers” to read their dates of birth out loud to ensure that they were given the correct horoscope to assess. Half the participants discovered an amazing coincidence—they shared the same birthday with the other person! (The other half of the participants, of course, found out that the two of them were born on different days.) The participant and actor rated the accuracy of their respective horoscopes and then left the laboratory. The volunteer thought that the experiment was over. In fact, it was just about to begin.
As the two walked along the hallway, the actor pulled a four-page essay from a book-bag and asked the volunteer whether he or she would mind carefully reading it and then writing a critique about how convincing the arguments were. Would those volunteers who believed that they shared a birthday with the actor be more accommodating than those who didn’t? About a third of people who thought they did not share a birthday with the actor agreed to help. In the “Wow, we have the same birthday, what a coincidence” group, almost two-thirds agreed. The simple belief in a shared birthday was enough to persuade people to donate a considerable chunk of their valuable time to a complete stranger.
John Finch and Robert Cialdini have even shown that the same effect causes people to turn a blind eye to other people’s crimes and misdemeanors.
26
In their study, participants read a biographical sketch describing the terrible crimes committed by Rasputin, the “Mad Monk of Russia,” and then rated the degree to which they thought Rasputin sounded like a nice fellow. Unbeknownst to the participants, the experimenters had found out their dates of birth beforehand and had manipulated the text seen by half the volunteers to make sure that Rasputin’s date of birth matched their own. When participants thought they shared a birthday with the mad monk, they were prepared to overlook his wrongdoings and evil deeds, and they found him significantly more likeable.
TOM DESMOND, DONATION BOXES, AND
MEDICAL CENTER
Chapter 3 described how Stanley Milgram’s innovative experiments into the “small-world” phenomenon helped explain why people frequently encounter friends of friends. When not conducting these giant games of pass the parcel, Milgram also carried out a considerable amount of research into the psychology of prosocial and antisocial behavior.
27
In the late 1960s, he turned his attention to one of the hottest questions: When it comes to hurting or helping others, to what extent is our behavior influenced by television? In short, do the programs we watch create the society in which we live?
The results of several surveys into the amount of violence on television had emphasized the need for this work. In 1971, one researcher found that violent incidents were shown on prime-time networks at the rate of eight times an hour. Another survey, conducted a few years later, found that children’s programming was “saturated with violence” and that 71 percent of shows contained at least one violent act.
28
Times haven’t changed. One recent survey estimated that by the time children leave primary schoo,l they will have witnessed an average of 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 acts of other violence on television.
29
Previous work on the topic had involved small-scale, laboratory-based studies in which experimenters showed children violent cartoons and then carefully counted the number of times the youngsters punched a large inflatable figure that just happened to be behind them. Milgram was determined to carry out a highly realistic piece of mass-participation research examining the possible impact of television on the American nation.
Funded by a large grant from CBS, Milgram persuaded television scriptwriters to pen different endings to an episode of a hugely popular prime-time drama series called
Medical Center
(apparently
Mission Impossible
was considered but rejected because, according to Milgram, it “regularly depicts such a degree of violence that our experimental act would appear trivial by comparison”). During the episode, a hospital orderly named Tom Desmond lost his job and so could not care for his sick wife and child. In one of the alternative endings, Desmond smashed open several fund-raising collection boxes, stole the money they contained, but he was
not
caught by the police. In another version, he stole the money but he
was
caught. As a control, the experimenters used a “neutral” episode of the series that was, according to Milgram, “romantic, sentimental, and entirely devoid of any violence or antisocial behavior.” Vincent Sherman, a well-known movie director who had made several successful films with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, was employed to help make the versions of the episode.
CBS broadcast the three episodes at different times throughout April 1971. Milgram had devised an elaborate, and ingenious, way of assessing the impact of the different programs on people’s behavior. Prior to the broadcasts, he mailed letters to thousands of people in New York City and St. Louis stating that they had been selected to take part in a market survey; the participants were asked to watch an episode of
Medical Center
at a designated time. They were then invited to complete a simple questionnaire about the characters in the episode and the commercials shown during the show’s breaks. Respondents were told that after the broadcasts they could claim a new radio in return for their participation and were directed to pick it up from a downtown “gift distribution center.”
The so-called gift distribution centers were actually fake warehouses staffed with actors and fitted with hidden cameras. When viewers arrived, they walked into an empty office and encountered this notice:
We have no more transistor radios to distribute.
This distribution center is closed until further notice.
This apparent lack of radios, combined with the brusque wording of the notice, was designed to elicit a sense of frustration in participants. The same room also contained a charity gift box on one of the walls. The box was overflowing with cash and would have proved a temptation to anyone of dishonest intent. The experimenters had even carefully placed a one-dollar bill dangling from the box to tempt those unwilling actually to break it open. This clever setup allowed Milgram to discover whether those who had seen Desmond steal from the charity box during the television program were more likely to engage in criminal behavior. After a few moments, the participants tried to retrace their steps and leave the building. It was then they discovered that the door that they had used to enter the office was locked, and they thus had to follow a series of exit signs. These signs led the participants into a small room in which they were met by a clerk who explained that the promised radios
were
available and gave the participants their gifts.