In 1973, researchers from Princeton University created an experiment to investigate factors that inhibit selflessness and altruistic behavior. The factors they wanted to test were the relative haste of a person and how distracted their minds were on other things such as religious and spiritual matters. Show So, seminary students were recruited and were told they were to be part of a study on religious education. The participants completed a personality questionnaire about their religion and then began fake experimental procedures. The fake experiments initially took place in one building, and after some time the participant was asked to go to another building for the second part of the experiment. On their way to the next building, there would be an actor who would pose as an injured victim in an alleyway. Before leaving, different participants were told different amounts of urgency for their walk, and participants were also told different tasks they would be doing when they arrived at the next building. One of these tasks was to prepare a talk about seminary jobs and the other was to prepare a talk about the story of the Good Samaritan. Surprisingly, the task assigned to the participant did not show any effect on helping behavior. However, the amount of urgency told to the participant had a major effect on helping behavior. Also, there was no correlation between the participant’s religious beliefs and helping behavior. The researchers concluded that thinking about certain “norms” does not imply that a person will act on them. The participant’s conflict between meeting the needs of the victim and the needs of the experimenters is what influenced their decision on whether to help or not. I found this study particularly interesting because of my fascination with religion and its influence on human behavior. This study may seem to disprove the connection between religious affiliations and ethics, but I see these results more as showing the humanity in even the most devout person. I can confidently state that being religious does not inherently make a person good. However, I would argue that it has a substantial impact on a person’s recognition of certain ethics and on their life outlook. Church is, from my perspective, a devotion of time every week to reaffirm a commitment to the good that we as humans strive to bring to the world. It carves an hour out of our busy lives to think about and give us a reason to be a good person. Through the past several decades, people have grown more cynical towards religion and towards the idea of attending church (for good reasons too). However, because of this, we have lost the ethical center of our communities that was present all the way through the 20th century. We all are easily distracted by the rush of life; this study has made that clear. I am by no means saying that people should feel obligated to attend church. However, I do believe that setting aside time every week to contemplate the idea of a higher purpose in life is essential to shaping our communities for the better.
In the book Wild Goose Chase I read about a study conducted by two Princeton University Psychologists that focused on the story of the Good Samaritan. Half of the seminary students were given an assignment to prepare a sermon on the Good Samaritan; the other half various topics. Once the assignment was completed, the student was then told to go to a certain building on campus to present their sermon. But there was a setup that would take the students by surprise. An actor was hired to portray someone who was mugged and left beat up in an alley; the same alley that each student would have to pass on their way to the presentation building. There was also one additional variable introduced by the researchers. Some of the seminarians were told to hurry because they were running late while the others were told to take their time because they were early. The researchers uncovered a surprising result. Each student was confronted with what seemed to be a real-life situation of someone in need. But only 10% of the students who were told to hurry stopped to help. 63% of the students who were told that they had extra time offered assistance. The researchers concluded that it didn’t matter if your life goal was to help people. What mattered most was that you were not living life in a hurry. The words, “You’re late” and “hurry” turned ordinarily compassionate people into people who were indifferent to suffering. In 1 John 3 we read: “Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” I have to wonder if a hurried life restricts our ability to love meaningfully. To Browse other Lamplighter Moments select a category below. Parenting • Career Preparation • Marriage • Character Development
In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37 in the New Testament,) a Samaritan helps a traveler assaulted by robbers and left half dead by the side of the road. Prior to the Samaritan, a priest and a Levite pass the injured traveler and fail to notice him. Conceivably, the priest and Levite’s contempt was because they didn’t sincerely follow those same virtues they espoused as religious functionaries. Possibly, they were in a hurry or were occupied with busy, important—even religious—thoughts. Perhaps the Samaritan was in less of a hurry since he wasn’t as socially important as the priest or Levite and was therefore not expected to be somewhere. The Princeton Seminary ExperimentInspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan, Princeton social psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson conducted a remarkable experiment in the 1970s on time pressure and helpful behavior. They studied how students of the Princeton Theological Seminary conducted themselves when asked to deliver a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. The students were to give the sermon in a studio a building across campus and would be evaluated by their supervisors. The researchers were curious about whether time pressure would affect the seminary students’ helpful nature. After all, the students were being trained to become ordained priests; they are presumably inclined to help others. As each student finalized his preparation in a classroom, the researchers inflicted an element of time constraint upon them by giving them one of three instructions:
As each student walked by himself from the preparation classroom to the studio, he encountered a ‘victim’ in a deserted alleyway just like the wounded traveler in the parable of the Good Samaritan. This victim (actually an associate of the experimenters) appeared destitute, was slouched and coughing and clearly in need of assistance. The seminarians were thus offered a chance to apply what they were about to preach. “Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”Researchers were interested in determining if their imposed time pressure affected the seminarians’ response to a distressed stranger. Remarkably, only 10% of the students in the high-hurry situation stopped to help the victim. 45% of the students in the intermediate-hurry and 63% of the students in the low-hurry situations helped the victim. The researchers concluded, “A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable… Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behavior, but being in a hurry decreased it.” In light of their training and calling, the seminarians’ failure of bystander intervention is probably not due to indifference, self-centeredness, or contempt. (Compare with the plot of the series finale of American sitcom Seinfeld, where Jerry and friends are prosecuted for failure of duty to rescue.) The dominant cause is time pressure. Most of the students who believed they had enough time to stop did so. In contrast, the vast majority of those who thought they were late did not stop to help. In other words, the perception of time pressure or “having limited time” resulted in behaviors incongruent to their education and career: the devotion to help others. Time pressure triggered these well-intentioned students to behave in ways that, upon reflection, they would find disgraceful. The weight of a time constraint caused the students to put their immediate concern of being on time before the wellbeing of someone in need. We’re in such hurry that we don’t stop to help ourselves“I’m Late, I’m Late for a very important date, No time to say hello. Goodbye. I’m late, I’m late, I’m late, and when I wave, I lose the time I save.” —White Rabbit in the Disney musical “Alice in Wonderland” (1951) The Princeton Seminary Experiment offers an even more personal lesson. As the researchers in this experiment expound, when we speed up and feel rushed, we experience a phenomenon known as “narrowing of the cognitive map.” That is, we miss details, we are not present enough in the moment to notice what is really important and we do not make the most beneficial choices for ourselves. As we make our way through life, not only do we not stop to help others—we also do not stop to help ourselves. We neglect our own needs. We fail to nurture ourselves. We surrender, we settle, we lose hope. We compromise ourselves and become what we often settle for. Our noisy world and busy lives constantly make us hurry as somebody always depends on us being somewhere. We constantly rush from place to place as if our lives depended upon it. We rush while doing just about everything. We are at the mercy of commitments often imposed by others. Life moves quickly. And we’ll have missed it.As our world continues to accelerate and our pace of life picks up speed, the clock’s finger turns inescapably. Life moves on by quickly, and soon enough we’ll have missed it entirely. Idea for Impact: Be ever-conscious of the fact that time is the currency of your lifeThe German theologian and anti-Nazi descendent Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) wrote in his “Letters and Papers from Prison”, “As time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable, the thought of any lost time troubles us whenever we look back. Time lost is time in which we have failed to live a full human life, gain experience, learn, create, enjoy, and suffer; it is time that has not been filled up, but left empty.” Make the best use of your time. Interrupt your busy life to help yourself by living more fully in the present. Nurture yourself. Your needs belong to the top. |
What was the Good Samaritan experiment
zusammenhängende Posts
Urheberrechte © © 2024 frojeostern Inc.
