Piliavin's Subway Samaritan Study

In 1969 Irving Piliavin, Jane Piliavin, Judith Rodin and colleagues conducted a field experiment on bystander intervention aboard New York City subway trains, staging a passenger's sudden collapse during a roughly seven-and-a-half-minute nonstop stretch of a route and recording how the other passengers in the car responded. The apparent victim, played by a research confederate, collapsed either appearing to be simply ill, carrying a cane, or appearing to be drunk, smelling of alcohol and carrying a liquor bottle in a bag, while the researchers varied the victim's race and observed whether and how quickly other passengers came to help. Passengers helped the cane-carrying victim in the great majority of trials, sixty-two of sixty-five, but helped the apparently drunk victim in only about half of trials, and help typically arrived within seconds when it came at all, considerably faster than in earlier laboratory studies of helping behavior. Contrary to the diffusion-of-responsibility pattern found in some prior bystander research, help in this study tended to come faster, not slower, in more crowded subway cars. The researchers proposed an arousal cost-reward model of helping in which bystanders weigh the personal costs of helping and of not helping under emotional arousal, and the study became an influential early demonstration of bystander behavior studied in a genuine field setting rather than a laboratory.