Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

by Adam Alter

  That explanation sounds plausible, but it doesn’t explain why bystander apathy predates the rise of violent media or why, as researchers have shown, bystanders aren’t equally apathetic across different situations. If bystanders are apathetic only sometimes, it seems less likely that our wiring is faulty than that certain situations lessen our tendency to intervene.

  The first proponents of the situational explanation were social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané. Darley and Latané observed the media storm that followed the Genovese murder, and were convinced that commentators and the media were oversimplifying the story. Instead of blaming New York City or the inherent heartlessness of New Yorkers, Darley and Latané set out to determine whether specific features of the situation might have dissuaded the onlookers from intervening. Their key insight was that the very feature that made the situation so shocking—that there were so many observers and not one of them intervened—ironically explained why the observers were so apathetic in the first place.

  To understand their insight, imagine this situation: you and a stranger are stranded on a desert island. Apart from the two of you, there isn’t another soul for miles. All of a sudden, the stranger collapses to the sand and lies motionless. How strongly do you feel the need to intervene? If you’re like most people, your drive to help the collapsed stranger is overwhelming. It’s very difficult to imagine carrying on with your day while your fellow castaway lies unconscious nearby. Now imagine a slightly different situation: this time, there are ten of you on the same island. You’re all strangers, and none of you is trained as a doctor. Again, one of the other castaways collapses to the sand. How strong is your desire to help? Surely, if you don’t help, one of the other castaways will intervene? And what if there were a hundred people on the island? Is your desire to help even weaker? As Darley and Latané observed, the responsibility to help is compelling when you’re the only potential source of help, but that same sense of personal responsibility is much weaker when it’s divided among several potential helpers.

  In the late 1960s, Darley and Latané conducted a series of experiments that demonstrated this diffusion-of-responsibility principle. In one experiment, New York University students visited the psychology lab to discuss the difficulties of college life with other students. The experimenter explained that the discussion would take place over an intercom system, rather than in person, a decision apparently designed to preserve the students’ anonymity, encourage them to share their views honestly, and shield them from embarrassment. Students could only speak one at a time, as the microphone system shut off as soon as someone else was speaking. Darley and Latané varied the size of the discussion groups, so some of the students spoke to just one fellow student, others to two others, and others still to a larger group of five. Apart from the naive New York University students, the other students on the intercom were fully briefed on the experiment’s aims, and how it would proceed. The discussions were uneventful as the students shared their initial views. But then, during the second round of comments, one student began to speak loudly and incoherently as if he were suffering a seizure. In fact, Darley and Latané had paid him to read from the following script over a period of two minutes:

  I-er-um-I think I-I need-er-if-if could-er-er-somebody er-er-er-er-er-er-er give me a little-er-give me a little help here because-er-I-er-I’m-er-erh-h-having a-a-a real problem-er-right now and I-er-if somebody could help me out it would-it would-er-er s-s-sure be-sure be good . . . because -er-there-er-er-a cause I-er-I-uh-I’ve got a-a one of the-er-sei er-er-things coming on and-and-and I could really-er-use some help so if somebody would-er-give me a little h-help-uh-er-er-er-er-er c-could somebody-er-er-help-er-uh-uh-uh [choking sounds]. . . . I’m gonna die-er-er-I’m . . . gonna die-er-help-er-er-seizure-er-[chokes, then quiet].

  The naive students listened in stunned silence as the fit continued, forced to decide whether to fetch help. As Darley and Latané expected, their responses differed dramatically depending on whether they believed other students were available to help. When they were engaged in a one-on-one discussion with the struggling student, 85 percent of them helped before the seizure ended, waiting for an average of 52 seconds after he first indicated signs of difficulty. In contrast, when they believed another student was listening to the unfolding seizure, only 62 percent of them helped before the seizure ended, waiting on average for a full 93 seconds. Worse still, and more consistent with the number of bystanders who ignored the Kitty Genovese and Hugo Tale-Yax tragedies, only 31 percent of the students helped before the seizure ended when four others were available to help, now waiting for an average of 166 seconds—nearly three minutes. By this time, the seizing student had grown silent after struggling to shout the words “I’m gonna die.” The students certainly took the seizure seriously—many of them yelled, “My God, he’s having a fit!” as soon as it began—but they were far less likely to help when the presence of other potential helpers diffused their sense of responsibility first.

  In contrast to the seizure in this experiment, some emergencies are ambiguous. Was Hugo Tale-Yax just another homeless man sleeping awkwardly, or was he in trouble? Surely, it didn’t help that each new bystander on the scene watched as countless others passed by without stopping to investigate. In a second experiment, Darley and Latané wanted to show that people interpret the inaction of others as a sign that there’s no emergency at all. Students sat in a waiting room and completed a questionnaire before they were due to participate in an experiment in another part of the building. Sometimes the students sat alone in the waiting room and sometimes they sat with several others. After a few minutes, the experimenters turned on a smoke machine in an adjacent room, and smoke began to filter through a vent into the room where the students waited for the next phase of the experiment to begin. The waiting room slowly filled with smoke, and the students were compelled to notice that an unexplained source in the next room was producing smoke.

  When the students sat in the room alone, they were quick to alert the experimenter to the thickening pall of smoke. But when they sat with other students, they glanced around nervously at one another and often failed to respond at all. You can imagine the scene: four students putting on a front of serene detachment as the room becomes so thickly filled with smoke that they can hardly see the questionnaires on their laps. Darley and Latané explained that the students weren’t sure whether the situation was an emergency at all. It’s a classic stalemate: no one wants to cry “emergency” when there’s no emergency at all, so everyone continues to sit by coolly as the room fills with smoke.

  Although it’s useful to understand how people respond to a generic audience—or bystanders in the case of Darley and Latané’s work—that’s only half the story. The second half rests on knowing more about the audience members: how they look, whether they’re male or female, and whether they’re loved ones or strangers. How do men respond to the presence of beautiful women? Why is it that people are able to withstand more pain when they’re looking at pictures of loved ones? Why are well-intentioned police officers still more likely to mistake a cell phone for a gun when it’s cradled in the hand of an innocent black man rather than an innocent white man? Without knowing more about the people in our midst, it’s difficult to say just how they’ll affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

  In the middle of the twentieth century, a young American psychologist named Abraham Maslow connected the dots between the people in his life and their effects on his behavior. He noticed that different people activated different needs, and so was born Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. But Maslow’s insights had begun to form many years earlier as he endured the hardships of growing up young, poor, and Jewish in 1920s Brooklyn.

  5.

  THE CHARACTERISTICS OF OTHER PEOPLE

  The Social Motives

  Brooklyn wasn’t an easy place for Jews at the turn of the twentieth century. When young Abraham Maslow wasn’t evading ga
ngs on his way to school, he was tussling with anti-Semitic teachers in the classroom. Life wasn’t much better at home, where Maslow struggled to get along with his mother. Years later, he described her as narcissistic, prejudiced, friendless, incapable of love, and slovenly—a cocktail of deficiencies that loomed large in years to come because they had plagued his childhood. Despite these hardships, Maslow was an optimist, and like many first-generation European Jewish immigrants, from economist Milton Friedman to virologist Jonas Salk, he believed in the liberating power of education. Maslow didn’t have many friends, so he spent most of his time indoors, reading and gradually developing an interest in the relatively young discipline of human psychology. Many of his contemporaries were fixated on rats in mazes, but Maslow soon found their research trivial, and instead he decided to explore the complexities that made humans different from other animals.

  Maslow’s greatest achievement came in 1943, when he published an opus titled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” a catalog that drew heavily from his difficult childhood in describing the goals and motives that make humans tick. Maslow claimed that once humans were assured of air, food, water, and sexual reproduction—the most basic physiological needs—they would seek safety from harm, just as his parents had done when they fled czarist persecution a few years before his birth. After safety, they would seek friendship, family, and love—the social comforts that eluded Maslow as a child. When those basic needs were met, they would turn their attention to gaining respect and achieving success at work, before finally embarking on the final motive: self-actualization. Maslow had always believed that education would free him from the shackles that confined most people to ploddingly mundane lives. With admiration, he watched as people like Albert Einstein achieved moral clarity and followed their creative and intellectual passions, presumably having satisfied their more basic lower-order needs.

  While, seventy years later, psychologists continue to debate the structure of Maslow’s hierarchy, few disagree that his motives guide a diverse array of human actions. During that seventy-year period, thousands of researchers have found their own creative and intellectual passions in trying to understand how we satisfy those motives. They’ve learned that while most animals rely on limited social interaction to achieve their goals, humans sometimes consciously and often unwittingly exploit social connections to satisfy their own motives. The story begins with the most basic goal—genetic survival through sexual reproduction—and the tendency for male chess players to adopt far riskier tactics when playing against beautiful women.

  The Sexual Motive: Chess-playing Beauties, Recklessness, and Lap Dances

  Chess isn’t in the canon of sexy sports, but fast-living French grandmaster Vladislav Tkachiev tried to campaign for its inclusion when he and his brother Evgeny founded the World Chess Beauty Contest in 2005. The brothers invited female chess stars from around the world to submit their most alluring photographs so a selection of male players who made up the Arbiters’ Board could anoint a queen. The photos flooded in. Russia’s Alexandra Kosteniuk, an international favorite, gazed coquettishly from behind a loaded chessboard. Laoura Hachatrian wore so little clothing that her concerned boyfriend insisted on censoring the bottom half of the original shot. Natalia Pogonina, a Liv Tyler lookalike, stood behind her guitar and pouted. The sport’s adherents also include Carmen Kass, a bona fide supermodel and former president of the Estonian National Chess League. Kass had been the face of Christian Dior’s J’Adore perfume, and also ran unsuccessfully for a position in the European Parliament.

  The physical presence of a competitor shouldn’t matter much in the cerebral domain of chess, but it has an enormous impact on performance. Experts will tell you that playing against a computer is very different from playing against a human opponent who makes identical moves. Even Vladislav Tkachiev blanched when he faced legend Garry Kasparov, who “looked a meter taller” than Tkachiev, though they were the same height. And what happens when men play against the sirens of chess—the Carmen Kasses and Alexandra Kosteniuks? Chess players are extreme rationalists, but that doesn’t mean their genes aren’t constantly geared toward fulfilling Maslow’s lowest-order motive: genetic survival through sexual reproduction. The males of some species fight to the death in search of potential mates, but male chess players approach a similar goal with greater subtlety.

  Like all heterosexual men, male chess players who are exposed to beautiful women produce more testosterone, which sets off a cascade of biological responses that encourage them to pursue Maslow’s sexual motive. One of those responses is the tendency to take risks in an attempt to impress attractive members of the opposite sex, which shows that the male has sufficient resources to gamble some of them on a risky bet. A group of European economists wondered, then, whether male chess players—normally conservative and patient during important matches—might adopt riskier strategies when facing attractive female opponents.

  The researchers collected data from hundreds of chess games to examine what happens when male competitors face beautiful female opponents during tournament play. The competitors in the sample were accomplished chess players between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four who played actively between 1997 and 2007. A group of adults rated the attractiveness of each player based on an official head shot, while the researchers devised two measures of riskiness during a match: preference for a risk-averse draw, and the riskiness of each player’s opening gambit. Draws are risk-averse, because two accomplished chess players are capable of directing the game to a draw with little risk of losing and very little hope of winning the match. Some opening moves are also riskier than others. Statistics show that players who adopt the risky Morra gambit, which requires sacrificing some pieces and exposing others early in the game, draw only 20 percent but lose 45 percent of the resulting games; in contrast, those who choose the safer Alapin gambit, protecting their valuable pieces with weaker pawns, draw 35 percent and lose only 33 percent of those games. The researchers found that male competitors adopted riskier opening gambits and assiduously avoided draws when they were seated across from attractive female opponents. Unfortunately for these bamboozled men, risky play comes at a cost, and they tended to lose many more games than their clearer-headed counterparts.

  What is it about pretty women that distracts male chess grandmasters (and men more generally) from the job at hand? The answer to that question comes from an ingenious study conducted at a skateboarding park thousands of miles away, in Brisbane, Australia. The inspiration for this research comes from a simple but staggering statistic: men are more than three and a half times more likely to die from all accidental causes than are women. Evolutionary psychologists believe that, just as male lions and elephants risk their lives in dominance contests, men are more likely to die accidentally because they take greater risks to impress women. According to the theory of evolution, our male ancestors competed for the affections of our female ancestors, and the successful among them mated and raised offspring. In other words, the roughly three billion men who populate the planet today are the lucky offspring of generations of males who procreated in part because they rose above the herd of their weaker, poorer, apprehensive counterparts. So the two social psychologists reasoned that men should be especially likely to take risks in the presence of an attractive woman—precisely the effect that the European economists found among male chess experts.

  Instead of investigating the behavior of chess experts, the psychologists trained their attention on male skateboarders. They approached almost a hundred skateboarders at a park in Brisbane, and asked them to perform a series of easy and difficult tricks. Difficult tricks carry some risk of injury, so although they’re more rewarding when completed, they’re also more dangerous. Skateboarders often minimize these risks by aborting tricks before they’re completed rather than exposing themselves to physical harm. At first, the men performed the tricks in front of a male experimenter, but later some of them repeated the tricks in front o
f an attractive eighteen-year-old female experimenter. Regardless of the experimenter’s gender, they completed most of the easy tricks with aplomb, rarely failing or aborting those tricks. But the story was very different when they attempted the difficult tricks. Although the skateboarders completed more difficult tricks successfully in front of the attractive female experimenter, her presence nudged them to fail many more and abort far fewer tricks. In the presence of an attractive female, men were more willing to take risks and less willing to abandon a trick that approached failure. Immediately after the skateboarders completed their tricks, the experimenter collected and analyzed their saliva—a popular method of measuring testosterone levels. As expected, the men who performed in front of an attractive female had significantly higher testosterone levels, and the higher those testosterone levels, the more likely the men were to follow through with poorly executed tricks. According to the logic of mating behavior, the attractive female experimenter activated the hapless skateboarders’ mating instincts, leading them to produce testosterone, which in turn undermined their willingness to abort tricks that were doomed to fail. Of course, those same men also completed more difficult tricks successfully, which suggests that minor pratfalls are sometimes a fair price to pay for ultimately impressing an audience of attractive females.

  The men in these experiments were obviously influenced by feminine beauty, but how do we know that they were motivated by sexual desire rather than merely succumbing to distraction? In late 2006, three psychologists tackled that question when they interviewed eighteen topless dancers who worked in an Albuquerque gentlemen’s club. The paper began by describing the economics of lap dancing, the atmosphere inside the club, and the club’s typical patrons because, as the authors recognized, “academics may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen’s club subculture.” Lap dancers earn most of their income from tips that generally range between $10 and $20, but male patrons have plenty of leeway. Some tip as little as $1, while others surrender wads of $20 bills. Patrons also give larger tips when they’re more attracted to the dancers—an evolutionary throwback in which the man tries to impress the woman by flaunting his resources. In an evolutionary sense, this ostentatious behavior is wasted if the man seduces a woman who can’t become pregnant, but not all women can bear children, and even fertile women are capable of conceiving for only six or seven days each month.