In his new book on how to reduce gun violence, Jens Ludwig Jens Ludwig tells the story of a classic social science Good Samaritan experiment (the book is Uuforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence).
In a canonical study from the 1970s, a team of social psychologists enrolled forty students from the Princeton Theological Seminary and asked them to walk across campus to another university building to deliver a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the biblical story, a man is robbed and left injured at the side of the road; he is then ignored by a passing priest before being cared for by a passing good Samaritan. In the study, the subjects encountered a person (a plant of the researchers) slumped in a doorway, not moving, eyes closed, who would cough and groan as the subject went by—a person, in other words, in need of help. Yet only 40 percent of the seminary students stopped to help the person in need. As the researchers observed, “On several occasions, a seminary student going to give a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way.”
What distinguished the subjects who helped from those who didn’t? Was it something about their character, like their level of religious devotion? It turns out that how religious subjects were explained little about who stopped to help and who didn’t. The most important factor? Whether the subject was in a hurry. Some were randomly assigned to be told they were late to give their talk, while others weren’t. Those who were in a hurry helped far less (10 percent) than those not in a hurry (63 percent). The lesson of the Bad Samaritan is not so much about the effects of hurrying per se. It’s more general: For helping behavior, the situation mattered far more than the person.
Many of us live large portions of our days in a hurry. But people in a hurry are often distracted, to the extent of not reacting to what’s in front of them in the way that they would actually prefer–that is, if people act (or don’t act) in they way they would have preferred if they weren’t in a hurry. The long-ago famous UCLA basketball coach John Wooden is quoted as saying: “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”
Ludwig’s theme about gun violence is that something like 80% of gun violence is not about immediate financial gain, as in a robbery, nor about psychopaths and assassinations, as in the movies, but instead is about a situation where an argument erupts between two people. Ludwig argues that there is often a short window of time when the argument escalates past a critical point into violence. If we can find ways to make the escalation less likely, or to interrupt that (say) 10-minute window, we can reduce the likelihood of one person dying and another person ending up in prison. The solution is often less about confrontation than it is about distraction–so that people who are walking down a tunnel of rage, or close to doing so, can divert to a different path. Ludwig makes no claim that this is a full or complete solution to gun violence, but only that there is considerable evidence from urban design and violence prevention programs that demonstrate real gains.
Ludwig is of course aware that this prescription won’t satisfy those who think the solution to gun violence involves laws and rules to restrict gun use, nor those who believe that a policy of more severe punishments for shooters will cause people in the midst of white-hot anger to think carefully and back away. He writes: “If, for better or worse, the four hundred million firearms in the US aren’t just going to disappear anytime soon, if major nationwide gun control is unlikely in the foreseeable future, then progress on gun violence can—or maybe must—come from figuring out how to reduce the tendency of people to use those widely available guns to harm one another.”
For some previous posts on the lack of evidence for what policies are likely to reduce gun violence, see here and here. For those who want to know more about the Good Samaritan study, the citation is Darley, John M., and C. Daniel Batson. “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27, no. 1 (1973): 100–108.
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