My blog from Houston, Texas. Updated most weeks, usually on Sundays.
I bent down to talk to him, but although he was lying face down, I could see that he seemed to be unconscious.
To my amazement, no other pedestrian stopped.
I was worried that when the traffic lights changed, cars would start moving and the drivers might not see him lying on the road. I stood up and called out to passers-by to help me move him to the side of the road. A couple of men came across, and as we started to lift him up together, he regained some consciousness, so we helped him walk to the side of the road as we kept an eye open towards the movement of the cars. We helped him sit down and stayed with him for a while to make sure he was okay, which fortunately, he was.
I was telling my daughter about this incident a few days later, and her immediate response was “Dad, why didn’t you upload a Facebook post about it?”.
To be honest, writing a Facebook post was probably the furthest thing from my mind at the time. Upon reflection, however, I started asking myself what kind of message I would have posted, because the staggering aspect of the experience from my perspective was not that a man had collapsed in front of me on the roadway, but that no-one else stopped to help.
Before my experience in Philadelphia, I would not have imagined a situation in which no pedestrian would stop and help an elderly man who had suddenly collapsed in the street. Was my experience in Philadelphia an example of the self-centered individualism that is said to typify the United States according to some foreign commentators?
In their experiment, Darley and Batson proposed three hypotheses: (1) People thinking religious, ‘helping’ thoughts would still be no more likely than others to offer assistance, (2) People in a hurry will be less likely to offer aid than others, and (3) People who are religious because of what they can gain from their religion will be less likely to help others than people who are religious because of the intrinsic value of the religion or who are searching for meaning in life.
To conduct the experiment, Darley and Batson had the seminarians complete a questionnaire, after which they were told to walk across to a different building to complete the procedure. Before they left the building, one group was told they would have to prepare a talk about seminary jobs, while the other group was told that they would need to prepare a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Within each group, there were two sub-groups, one of which was told the task was urgent while the other was given no message about urgency.
0 = failed to notice the victim as being in need
1 = perceived a need but did not offer aid
2 = did not stop but helped indirectly (told the aide upon arrival)
3 = stopped and asked the victim if he needed help
4 = after stopping, insisted on taking the victim inside, and then left him
5 = refused to leave the victim, or insisted on taking him somewhere
The results were, I think, fascinating.
As I would have expected, the amount of rush that had been induced in the seminarians did have a major effect in whether or not they were willing to stop and help the victim. Of greater interest, however, the task they had been given did not affect their willingness to stop, even when their task was to prepare a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
I wonder what would be the distribution of Awty’s students if they were to participate in a similar experiment. And I wonder if the distribution of their parents would indicate a greater or a lesser willingness to stop and help than their children would show.
Those who have been driving to school during the last couple of weeks since we lost access to the Marq’E car park beside the school will appreciate where I am about to go with this line of thinking.
Carpool lines can be both long and frustrating. Sadly, long carpool lines and congested parking garages tend not to trigger the exemplary standard of behaviour towards others that an idealistic Head of School might desire as he watches the daily parade of motor vehicles from his office window or when he stands beside the drop off points.
My hope is that any residual anger will disperse as these measures are introduced, and my deeper expectation is that a culture of mutual respect and empathy will be role modelled to our students. As the American/Turkish cardiothoracic surgeon, author, and television personality, Mehmet Öz observed, “the opposite of anger is not calmness, it’s empathy”.
Empathy [noun]: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Yes, empathy should always be one of the key defining characteristics of our school culture.
Empathy
Sunday, 24 March 2013