From “Love Your Neighbor: How Psychology Can Enliven Faith and Transform Community” by Katherine M. Douglass and Brittany M. Tausen
The field of psychology has much to say about who will help and when. One famous study from the 1970s is called the Good Samaritan study. Researchers placed seminarians in a helping dilemma that mirrored the good Samaritan parable found in Luke 10. A scene was staged in an alleyway between buildings on a college campus where a man was slumped over, moaned, and coughed twice as seminarians walked through the four-foot-wide space. Who would stop to help the man? Before the encounter the seminarians took a survey regarding the way they thought of their religious identity. Were they more of a Levite, concerned with what they gain from faith, or were they more of a Samaritan, thinking about faith as a quest? They were then told to go through the alley to the next building to give a talk – with varying levels of urgency. Some were told, “You have plenty of time.” Others were told, “The meeting is about to start,” and a third group was told, “Hurry, you are late!” Upon their arrival, they gave a talk they had prepared either on seminary job prospects or the parable of the good Samaritan. Researchers found that even though all the seminarians took a route that required them to pass by the man in need of help, only 40 percent stopped to offer some kind of assistance. So who were the 40 percent?
You might expect that the so-called “quest-ers,” those that seemed to hold beliefs more similar to those of the Samaritan hero of the parable, would be more likely to help than those who held more self-focused beliefs (the Levitical “gain-ers”). But the researchers found no such relationship. Personal beliefs did not predict who helped – at all. Well, then, perhaps it wasn’t what the seminarians believed as much as what they were thinking about at any given point in time that would influence their likelihood to help? In other words, maybe those whose faith was top of mind, due to preparing to talk about the good Samaritan parable, would be more likely to help. But again, that was not the case. The only factor that the researchers were able to identify as a significant predictor of who helped was time. Of those who were in the “high hurry” condition, only 10 percent stopped to help. Things looked a bit better in the “medium hurry” condition, nearly half of those folks stopped to help (45 percent). In the “low hurry” condition, 63 percent stopped to help. Even with lots of time on their hands, this is still far from the 100 percent we might hope for (or even expect) with a group of seminarians, half of whom are getting ready to give a talk about the importance of stopping to help.