Darley and Batson's Good Samaritan Experiment

In 1973 John Darley and Daniel Batson conducted the Good Samaritan experiment at Princeton Theological Seminary, recruiting seminary students to test whether personal religious disposition or immediate situational pressure better predicted whether a person would stop to help someone in apparent distress. Participants were asked to prepare a short talk, for some on the parable of the Good Samaritan and for others on a neutral topic such as job prospects for seminary graduates, and were then told to walk to another building to deliver it, with instructions that varied how much time pressure they were under. Along the route each participant encountered a confederate slumped in a doorway, coughing and appearing to need help. Overall only about forty percent of participants stopped to help, and the topic of the talk they were about to give made little difference, but time pressure had a large effect: about sixty-three percent of participants in the lowest hurry condition helped, compared with roughly forty-five percent under moderate hurry and only about ten percent under high hurry, several of whom literally stepped over the victim on their way to speak about the parable of the Good Samaritan itself. Darley and Batson concluded that situational pressure, not stated religious values, was the stronger predictor of helping behavior in the moment.