What Would You Do?

Imagine you’re walking down a bustling city street when you see a person collapse. What’s your first instinct? Do you stop and help? What if that person appears to be unhoused or is holding a can of beer? Would your reactions change?

A TV show tested this situation (you can see it in this old What Would You Do? video clip). In the first scenario, a well-dressed woman collapses and is helped within seconds, with passersby quickly calling 911. In contrast, when a presumed unhoused man collapses in the second scenario, the reactions are slower and less immediate, with an average response time of three minutes. In the final scenario, the man is portrayed holding a can of beer when he collapses. This time, it took a significant amount of time and 88 passersby before anyone decided to help.

Why Should You Care?

This experiment was a staged study designed for TV, but it was based on a classic experiment by two social psychologists (Bibb Latané and John Darley). Social psychologists are interested in understanding how and why people behave in certain social situations. It’s just one area psychology explores. Others include learning, emotions, stress, and mental health. If you’ve ever wondered why people behave a certain way, you’re already thinking like a psychologist!

Other psychologists investigate how people learn, how we process and interpret emotions, how we deal with stress, or why and how some people develop psychological disorders. Psychologists study human development, sensation, perception, neuroscience, the components of consciousness, whether or not our personality is stable over our lifetime, how we acquire language, how we make decisions, what intelligence actually means, and so much more. If you have ever found yourself wondering about how or why people act the way they do, then you, too, have begun the process of thinking like a psychologist.

Key Themes in Psychology

On most of these pages, we’ll discuss an interesting story or research example (like the “What Would You Do? ” story above) and connect it to one of the integrative themes of psychology. The idea behind these integrative themes is that no matter what topic of psychology you learn about (research, learning, memory, personality, social psychology, mental disorders, etc.), you should finish the course with an understanding of these broad and overarching concepts that tie together different areas of the field. You can see the themes in the image below.

Connecting to the Themes

Consider this “What Would You Do?” example about bystander intervention. How do you think it might connect to some of these APA themes?

• Theme A: The producers attempted to set up an experiment to measure how people would behave. This coincides with theme A, which says that “Psychological science relies on empirical evidence and adapts as new data develop.”
• Theme B: With each of the situations shown in the video, most people acted one way, but not everyone. Even in the most extreme condition where the man who was assumed to be unhoused and drinking alcohol collapsed, some people stopped to help. This highlights APA theme B, which says that psychology explains general principles to govern behavior while recognizing individual differences.
• Theme C: This says that “psychological, biological, social, and cultural factors influence behavior and mental processes.” Can you think of any psychological, social, or cultural reasons that might stop a person from helping someone else?

Can you brainstorm ways this scenario could connect with another integrative theme?