![]() Second, if you are unfortunate enough to find yourself the victim and are in need of help, make sure you make it clear to those around you that this is an emergency situation. At worst, you will embarrass yourself for a few minutes, but at best, you will save a life. If you think there is even a possibility that someone is in need, act on it. So we know that one reason why people fail to help is because they don't realize they are witnessing a crime, but how can we use this information to our advantage? First, if you find yourself in an ambiguous situation, resist the urge to look to others and go with your gut instinct. When we are in the presence of other bystanders, we are likely to look to those others for guidance and if they are not responding or are laughing or are taking photos of the event, we will mistakenly conclude it is not an emergency and will fail to help. Thus, when we are alone, we are more likely to assume an ambiguous situation represents and emergency and act accordingly. In some cases, the smoke got so thick the participant could barely read the questionnaire in front of them! Yet, as long as their fellow bystanders remained in calm, they did as well. But when there were two other people in the room who remained calm, only 10% left to get help. The result showed that when the participant was alone, 75% of them left to report the smoke. The key question in this study was would the participant notice the smoke and go get help or would they simply write it off as nothing concerning and continue working on their questionnaire. In actuality, these two "students" were working for the researchers and were instructed to keep calm not matter what happens. Some participants were the only one in the room when this happened, but for others, there were two other students completing questionnaires in the room as well. For their study, they had participants complete a questionnaire and after a few minutes, smoke started to pour into the room underneath a door in the back. ![]() In one of Darley and Latane's classic studies, they tried to recreate this phenomenon in the lab. The fact that several of the eyewitnesses in the Richmond case were laughing and taking photos with their cell phones suggests that they simply failed to realize they were witnessing a brutal rape and instead may have thought it was a prank. All the bystanders may look to each other to determine if they are witnessing a crime, and if no one reacts, then everyone will wrongly conclude that this is not an emergency and no one will step up and help. The same process can occur when we witness an ambiguous emergency situation. So in this situation, my class is suffering from pluralistic ignorance because each one assumes they are the only one confused, when in fact all the students are confused and all of them are incorrectly concluding that they are the only one. But as a teacher, I have discovered that if one student is unsure about the material, odds are most of the students are. To avoid looking stupid, she may choose to keep her hand down and not ask me her question. If no one else looks puzzled, she will conclude that she is the only one in the room that didn't get the material. Before raising her hand, she will likely look around to room to see if any of her fellow students seem confused or have their hand up as well. Let's say that one of my students is confused about the class material I just covered and wants to ask me to clarify. ![]() For example, pluralistic ignorance explains why my undergraduate students often fail to ask questions in class.
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