Piliavin Subway Study

What was the Piliavin et al. (1969) Study?

This research came about after 28-year-old Kitty Genevese was stabbed to death outside her apartment building in 1964. After the murder, The New York Times reported that 38 witnesses didn’t call the police. The news report has been called into question since then, as it turns out no one saw the whole event from start to finish, and not everyone who heard her realised it was a cry for help. Some thought it was lovers or drunken quarrels.

There are also disputes as to how many witnesses there were. However, the idea that so many people witnessed the crime yet still failed to help shocked many and led psychologists to investigate why people don’t immediately jump to the rescue when they hear about or see a crime.

They put two theories forth to try and explain this phenomenon: ‘the bystander effect’ and ‘diffusion of responsibility’.

Piliavin et al. (1969) conducted a field experiment investigating these factors. Why would someone be less likely to help someone with other people around?

The reasons are:

• If no one else is helping, the individual believes the situation is not an emergency.

• They fear others will unfavourably judge them.

• Diffusion of responsibility.

Piliavin Study Aim

The Piliavin study investigated whether subway passengers would be more likely to help someone drunk or ill and white or black. They also investigated whether the presence of a helper would influence others to help too. The researchers were interested in the subway passengers’ speed, response frequency, and the effect of race.

Fig. 1: Picture of the subway in New York

Piliavin Study Procedure

Piliavin et al. conducted the study on a seven-and-a-half-minute journey between two New York City subway stations. The subway did not stop at stations in between. There were 103 trials conducted in total. In total, there were about 4450 participants.

Four researchers (two male and two female) got on the subway for each trial. The female researchers sat down and took notes. One male researcher played the ‘victim’ while the other male was a ‘helper’. Four males played the victim role (three white and one black). In 38 trials, the victim smelled alcohol and carried alcohol in a brown bag (drunk condition). In 65 trials, the victim was sober and carried a cane (ill condition). All the victim males took part in both conditions.

The study was set up so that the victim collapsed after the subway passed the first station, which took approximately 70 seconds. There were then two conditions:

• ‘No help’ condition: The helper did nothing to help the victim until the train arrived at the destination station. The helper then helped the victim to his feet.

• ‘Help’ condition: The helper assisted the victim. There were four different situations in the ‘help’ condition depending on two factors. One of the factors was the distance between the helper and the victim. Two possible options were possible: critical area (this is, the victim and the helper were a couple of meters away) and adjacent area (the victim and the helper were around 4-5 meters away). The second factor was the speed with which help was provided. In this way, there was the early condition (help was provided 70ms after collapse) and late condition (help was provided 150ms after collapse).

The researcher sitting down and taking notes did not only take quantitative data such as the number of people helping and the number of seconds needed for help to be provided. Qualitative data was also gathered, which included the words and comments that the participants expressed throughout the experiment.

Piliavin Study Controls

The study presented a number of control variables:

• The victims all dressed the same and behaved the same way, so all participants were exposed to the same standardised behaviour.
• The scenario took place between the same two subway stations in New York City.
• Victims were always male

Results

• Ill condition: The victim received help before the helper assisted in all but 3 of the trials (62 out of 65 trials).
• Drunk condition: the victim received help in half of the trials (19 out of 38 trials).

An ill person is more like to receive help than a drunk person. In both conditions, men were more likely to help than women. In the ill condition, there was no difference in the amount of help given to black and white males. In the drunk condition, the victim was more likely to receive help from those of his ethnicity.

Across the trials, in 60% of cases, the help received was from more than one person. After one person approached to help, the results found that two, three, or even more people quickly followed. However, the longer the victim did not receive help, the people were more likely to move away from the critical area or justify why they did not help.

Piliavin Conclusions

The study found that more help was given and more quickly than ‘the bystander effect’ and ‘diffusion of responsibility’ would have suggested. Researchers observed no real ‘diffusion of responsibility’. The results could be due to the location where the passengers were in a subway, and there was no way for them to ‘escape’ or run away from the emergency, resulting in a higher level of assistance.

Piliavin et al. proposed a model that when someone witnesses an emergency, it prompts an emotional response, and they decide whether they help by a cost-reward analysis. Their motivation to help is to get rid of the unpleasant emotions while witnessing the emergency.

Piliavin Strengths and Weaknesses

Here we present the strengths and weaknesses of the Piliavin Subway Study.

Strengths

• As this was a field experiment, the participants did not know they were part of a study, so they had no demand characteristics.

• There was a large sample size of 4550 participants, so the study results are generalisable.

Weaknesses

• Hard to control extraneous variables in field experiments; for instance, some passengers could have been present at more than one trial.

Piliavin Study: Ethical issues

The study presents, however, a number of ethical issues which would not allow this study to be conducted these days.

As this was a field experiment, the participants could not consent before being in the study. Also, it was not possible to withdraw from the study. It may have been stressful for the participants to see someone collapse. If the participant did not help at the time, later they might have felt guilty for their inaction.

And further, deception was used in the research study. Victims were not truly victims and this may have evoked negative feelings in participants after they found out.

Is Piliavin's Study Reliable?

The reliability of the study can be questioned at a number of different levels.

Due to methodological problems, there were more cane trials than drink trials, making the conditions unequal, which may have influenced the analysis.

Since it used the observational methodology, the sample happened to be the people that were in the underground that day at that time. However, the characteristics of these people remain unknown, and therefore, no confound bias can be explored.

The participants in the study and all the victims were males, which does not allow results to be generalised to the female population.