I write this blog about indifference, so did I know what to do when I saw someone in trouble?
Nope.
The other day my wife, my son and I were going home on the subway in Brooklyn. As we walked down the stairs and onto the subway platform to wait for our train, we noticed a man. His short hair and beard were mostly gray, and he looked to be in his 50s. He was wearing a t-shirt or jersey and shorts. He was also lying on his side, curled up, as if in bed, on the concrete floor.
He wasn't dead (he stirred a little every few seconds). Nor was he bleeding or obviously injured. A near-empty bottle on the bench next to him made me think he might just be drunk. But I didn't get close enough to establish that. Once I'd realized he wasn't dead or dying I acted like most other people on the platform. That is, I kept to myself, talking to my son as if there was nothing out of the ordinary.
You could call this acting as if the man wasn't lying there, or you could call it acting as if middle-aged men lie down subway platforms all over town. But the key to ignoring someone isn't to work out the reason you're ignoring him. To give it that much thought is to pay attention to the hole in your perceptions where he should be. At which point you've made space in your mind for that other person, and your resistance to filling it is a form of attention after all. So you're stuck where you didn't want to be. Like the man Dostoevsky told to not think about a polar bear.
I am not that sort of amateur when it comes to ignoring people. I was managing, like most everyone else around, to think of other things.
My wife, however, is not this sort of person. She moved in for a closer look. She couldn't ignore him, and my son and I couldn't ignore her. So now our family had a dilemma: Should we leave this man be? Or try to help him? If the latter, how?
These are the sort of questions that are neat and clear in ethics texts and thought experiments from philosophy class. The imperative is also clear in religious traditions and in our civic culture: We should help the person in need. That's the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
But this situation threw at us the ambiguities of real life. What did this man need? What did he think he needed? Once we had left the realm of life and death, immediate threat and urgency, it was not clear how to interpret the case.
Summoning help, as a practical matter, would likely have brought the police. It was far from impossible that this man would not want that. New York City is in the midst of a systematic effort to get unhoused people out of the subway system. That has involved arrests, fines and kinder interventions that nonetheless have put people in shelters where they didn't want to be. I could not assume that Official New York would make this man's situation better. Even when his current situation was being passed out on a dank, dirty floor.
Then, too, there was the consideration foremost in the minds of most people in big cities, as they interact with strangers: the cost of intervention to the intervener.
My experience of New York in the 1980s and 1990s has left me with the sense that any confrontation with a stranger can become very dangerous very fast. This doesn't mean that the city is as crime-infested as it was in 1982 (and even in the era of "high crime rates," believe it or not, most of us simply went about our business in tranquillity). Nor does it mean that most interactions here among strangers are dangerous. They aren't.
Nor do such thoughts mean that most people in distress are ignored here. Despite stereotypes about big cities in general and New York in particular, I've always found people ready and willing to help one another — and the worse the distress, the more people get involved.
Still, even if this man would be grateful for the well-intentioned act, there are other costs. To function in a city of strangers we all walk around in a bubble. To let someone into it is to give up control over one's space and time. Waiting for help could involve hours.
I was particularly sensitive to this possibility, because as it happened I was tired — achey, moving as if underwater tired, and I really wanted to get home.
And yet.
That the man was lying there at people's feet strongly suggested that he wasn't doing well. If I had no proof that he needed immediate help, I also had no proof that he didn't need it.
All these irresolute thoughts, plus the lack of any obvious urgent emergency, left us there asking each other what we should do. I leaned toward "nothing" (this is a character flaw of mine; I hang back). My wife leaning toward "something."
At this point another passenger came by. A young woman in a t-shirt and shorts and a complicated hair dye, suggesting prosperity. She too looked long and hesitantly at the man. She too walked away, then circled back. She and my wife caught each other's eye.
What do you think? Should we do something?
The presence of each nudged the other toward action. They walked up together to a big metal box, fixed to a pillar. It had a speaker and two buttons, one red (EMERGENCY CALL) and one green (INFO).
Was this an emergency? See above. It was hard to say. Slowly, hesitantly, looking at my wife, embodying uncertainty fighting with a sense that something should be done, the young woman pressed the button they'd agreed should be pressed — INFO. A voice squawked out of the box. The two women tried to explain the situation as we'd found it. The voice disconnected. Hang up? Accident? It wasn't clear.
They pressed the button again.
As the "it's ringing" sound began, a new dilemma arose: Our train home, pulling into the station.
Now was a crucial and urgent decision. Did we stay to follow up, or did we continue home?
My wife said, gently, to the other woman: Is this your train?
I wonder if she, in her turn, weighed a new dilemma. Should she let us off the hook? On the one hand, support would be nice. On the other, we had a kid with us.
No, she said, go ahead.
And so, with this permission to leave things with our fellow citizen, we went home.
I hope the woman persisted, and managed to explain matters to the squawking voice, and that someone medically competent came by to check on the man, without embroiling him in additional miseries.
But, having checked out, I can't know what happened.
Such is the real life play of concern and apathy. Indifference is simple to diagnose at a distance — those people don't care! — but cloudy in close-up, where conflicting emotions and priorities slam up against the circumstances of the moment.
And in this mix circumstances never get the credit they deserve. For all that people like to imagine they're consistent and principled, fleeting details in their surroundings have a big impact on their decisions.
Fifty years ago a pair of psychologists, John Darley and C. Daniel Batson, conducted an experiment that remains a canonical demonstration of this point. Their "guinea pigs" were 47 students at Princeton Theological Seminary. Each one was told to give a talk on the other side of the Princeton campus. After each was en route, the experiment began: Each one now came upon an apparently injured stranger.
This was actually an actor. Four of the cannier students recognized that something was fishy here, and their suspicions resulted in their data being booted out of the final analysis. (I picture them, later in life, turned into the sort of flinty clergy whom no parishioner can bullshit.)
The other students, who believed what they were seeing, now faced a dilemma: Should they stop to help?
It turns out that this decision depended on what they’d been told by the researchers just before. Of those who had been told that they were already late, only one in 10 stopped to assist the “victim.”’ Those who thought they had just enough time were more charitable; more than 40 percent of them stopped. Meanwhile, a third grouping, who’d been given more than enough time, were kinder, with six in 10 lending a helping hand.
It made no difference that all these students were all studying to join the clergy. Nor did their different philosophies and religious convictions (measured by questionnaires) predict what they’d do. It didn’t even make a difference that half of them were about to give their talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
I would love to add that their gender made no difference either, but I can't. The 51-year-old paper gives no male/female breakdown, and in fact doesn't mention gender at all. You might expect that women stopped more than men, because women do more caring for others in this society, by far. On the other hand, in situations involving strangers, some researchers have found that men help more (proposed explanation: Male social roles include chivalrously helping strangers, while women are more often involved in the long-term grind of caring for children, parents and others whom they know).
In any event, a lot of behavior tagged "indifferent" in hindsight is, I think, irresolution in ambiguous circumstances, combined with the pressures of the situation. It's not deciding that we don't care about something or someone. It's thinking that we don't know how much we care, or should care, or what care means in the moment in which we find ourselves. It's enough to make one envy the rare saints and monsters among us, who, for their different reasons, are always certain what to do.