I'm new to the whole
Facebook thing.
I held out for years, reasoning that it was something my students spent a lot of time on, and, believe it or not, there are many things I'd really rather not know about my students. And vice versa, I'm sure. But in recent months, I discovered that 1) you can keep your account as private as you want to and 2) all sorts of apparently-old people like me are now starting to sign up. So I went ahead and succumbed to peer pressure.
I was on the site last month and noted that one of my Facebook friends–in this case, someone I actually still talk to, not, say, the guy I had a vague dislike for back in 6th grade summer camp who now feels the need to list my name on his wall–had just joined a group called "Survivors of the Purple Tunnel of Doom." It was the first I had heard of this phrase, which I assumed had something to do with yet another Indiana Jones sequel.
But as many of you know by now, the purple tunnel actually refers to the location in which thousands and thousands of inauguration ticket-holders were stranded for hours on the morning of January 20th (left). Though in the company of fellow celebrants, these hardy souls would not get a glimpse of our new President that morning, unless, that is, they managed to get out of said tunnel and find a bar so they could watch the event of television like the rest of us.
By most accounts–and there are dozens of them now available on-line in the form of news articles, first-person reports, and blogs–there just wasn't enough staff or organization in place to screen all the ticket-holders. And as a result, campaign workers and first-time voters alike stood shoulder-to-shoulder for hours with little movement and even less of an idea as to what was going on.
Amazingly, though, throughout this frustration and uncertainty, there was also little evidence of aggression, rioting, or other anti-social activity. I've witnessed people verbally abusing flight attendants over a 5-minute, beverage-cart induced wait to get back to their aisle seat. Yet these thousands of agitated ticket-holders–many of whom flew across the country, but had to settle for TV replays of the historical swearing-in, not to mention the majesty of Aretha Franklin's gray hat–were able to pass the time peacefully, and by some accounts even jovially.
When I emailed my friend to ask for details, his description of the events in the tunnel was as follows:
"The self-policing was very interesting–from castigating ‘cutters' to passing information (usually false) back-and-forth, to singing everything from patriotic songs to the theme from Gilligan's Island, to protecting young and old from getting trampled."
In fact, he went so far as to suggest that the experience was interesting enough to make one consider becoming a social psychologist. I understand completely.
But I was also intrigued by my friend's final diagnosis of why the crowd was able to remain relatively civil, despite the uncomfortable and unfortunate circumstances surrounding their enclosure:
"Seriously, if this wasn't a group of organizers and generally peaceful individuals, it would have been real ugly."
An intriguing hypothesis, that the ocupation, and perhaps more importantly, the personal disposition of the individuals in this crowd explained their behavior that morning. It's an intuitively appealing hypothesis as well: it seems logical that had the tunnel been filled with professional wrestlers, Baltimore Ravens defensemen, or gubernatorial candidates from Illinois, the outcome might not have been so peaceful.
Or does it? Four decades ago, in a study that has become one of the most famous in all of psychology, John Darley and Daniel Batson wanted to test this very question, to assess the relative importance of predisposition and social context in shaping pro-social behavior. What, they pondered, would have the biggest impact on whether or not an individual drops what he is doing to offer assistance to another person, his personality type or the situation in which he finds himself?
To answer this question, Darley and Batson set up their own version of the Good Samaritan parable, with a couple of twists. They paid a "shabbily dressed" actor to slump over the side of a road between two buildings. They created an elaborate cover story that sent their research participants from one building to the next, ostensibly for the purpose of giving an oral presentation at the second location. Would participants notice the man lying in the street in need of some type of assistance? Would they stop what they were doing to help him? Or would they just keep on walking?
In the study fewer than half of the participants helped the actor in the street. This finding becomes all the more striking when you learn who these participants were. They were seminary students, many of whom had been told to head to the second building to give a talk on the topic of... the parable of the Good Samaritan.
In Darley and Batson's study, the most powerful determinant of whether people exhibited pro-social behavior wasn't their occupation (after all, these were seminary students, people you'd expect to be highly attuned to alleviating the suffering of others and to the needs of the less fortunate). And it wasn't the topic of the talk they were told to give either. It was a far simpler, more mundane situational factor that had the biggest impact on them: only 10% of the students who were told they were running behind schedule stopped to help, while 63% of those who believed they were ahead of schedule did so.
In the end, the situation trumped personality in the Good Samaritan study. Context won out over occupation.
So do I believe that the personal character of the purple tunnel survivors contributed to their apparently exemplary behavior on January 20th? Sure I do, to some extent. I don't expect that a tunnel full of Congressmen or Merrill Lynch CEOs would have toed the line in quite the same way. But I think the situation played a major role as well, even if our default tendency is to overlook that role. Would the same group of people have been as well-behaved if stranded for 5 hours on a runway tarmac? Or if they had been waiting to rally against a cause, like the war in Iraq, instead of to celebrate an event about which they were enthused, optimistic, and gratified? I'm not so sure.
As my friend from the purple tunnel might suggest, these are all interesting questions to ponder. But not right now, I'm afraid. You see, the Aretha's hat fan club is getting ready for our weekly Facebook chat, so I've gotta go...
