Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

Chapter 4, entitled “In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing: Darley and Latané’s Training Manual—A Five-Stage Approach,” examines the 1964 work of John Darley and Bibb Latané, two psychologists who wanted to examine the conditions that would instigate helping behavior in humans. Darley and Latané devised a series of experiments to gauge “the conditions necessary for people to ignore one another’s cries for aid, and the conditions wherein compassion holds sway” (93). The chapter is divided into five sections, each one named after one of Darley and Latané’s five conditions for spurring an individual to help another.

“1. You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occurring” (94). The chapter opens from Slater’s perspective, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when a terrorist attack levelled the Twin Towers. Slater orders gas masks for her and her daughter; her husband refuses. Slater feels a mounting sense of anxiety but does not know exactly why: “But what is the emergency? The situation in this country is suddenly so ambiguous, difficult to decipher” (94). Her behavior is in contradiction to the work of John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, who in the 1960s, studied “the human propensity to deny emergencies” (94).