I haven’t read your post yet. Just doing an epistemic spot check. You described the first video clip of the fire alarm experiment as featuring multiple innocent participants. In fact, as they say on the video, only one participant in the group settings was innocent. The rest were actors who were to deliberately give no indication that they noticed the fire or fire alarm.
Edit: Katja never actually said the clip was from the part of the experiment featuring multiple innocent subjects. I misinterpreted the statement.
Sorry for being unclear. The first video shows a rerun of the original experiment, which I think is interesting because it is nice to actually see how people behave, though it is missing footage of the (I agree crucial) three group case. The original experiment itself definitely included groups of entirely innocent participants, and I agree that if it didn’t it wouldn’t be very interesting. (According to the researcher in the footage, via private conversation, he recalls that the filmed rerun also included at least one trial with all innocent people, but it was a while ago, so he didn’t sound confident. See footnote there.)
It still looks to me like this is what I say, but perhaps I could signpost more clearly that the video is different from the proper experiment?
Ah, now I see. My bad. By the end of the video, I’d lost the nuance that you never stated the clip was of the 3 innocent subjects portion of the experiment. Might be worth signposting that explicitly? I’ll retract my comment above, but I also suspect that others may make the same mistake that I did.
On introspection, I think the issue is that I read the “3 innocent subjects” bit, visualized it in my mind, got interested to see it play out, and spent 8 minutes waiting to see it on the video clip. Not seeing it, I just immediately thought, “oh, must have been an incorrect description of the video,” rather than going back to carefully think about your wording. So definitely my bad, but also a mistake I think some others are likely to make, and which may be worth anticipating as a writer. Note to self for any future blog posts with embedded video!
This also feels quite important to me. My current model is that a room with 2+ innocent participants plus a fire alarm would pretty reliably result in people taking the right action.
Agree the difference between actors and real companions is very important! I think you misread me (see response to AllAmericanBreakfast’s above comment.)
Your current model appears to be wrong (supposing people should respond to fire alarms quickly).
From the paper:
”Subjects in the three naive bystander condition were markedly inhibited from reporting the smoke. Since 75% of the alone subjects reported the smoke, we would expect over 98% of the three-person groups to contain at least one reporter. In fact, in only 38% of the eight groups in this condition did even 1 subject report (p < .01). Of the 24 people run in these eight groups, only 1 person reported the smoke within the first 4 minutes before the room got noticeably unpleasant. Only 3 people reported the smoke within the entire experimental period.”
Fig 1 in the paper looks at a glance to imply also that the solitary people all reported it before 4 minutes.
I haven’t read your post yet. Just doing an epistemic spot check.
You described the first video clip of the fire alarm experiment as featuring multiple innocent participants.In fact, as they say on the video, only one participant in the group settings was innocent. The rest were actors who were to deliberately give no indication that they noticed the fire or fire alarm.Edit: Katja never actually said the clip was from the part of the experiment featuring multiple innocent subjects. I misinterpreted the statement.
Sorry for being unclear. The first video shows a rerun of the original experiment, which I think is interesting because it is nice to actually see how people behave, though it is missing footage of the (I agree crucial) three group case. The original experiment itself definitely included groups of entirely innocent participants, and I agree that if it didn’t it wouldn’t be very interesting. (According to the researcher in the footage, via private conversation, he recalls that the filmed rerun also included at least one trial with all innocent people, but it was a while ago, so he didn’t sound confident. See footnote there.)
It still looks to me like this is what I say, but perhaps I could signpost more clearly that the video is different from the proper experiment?
Ah, now I see. My bad. By the end of the video, I’d lost the nuance that you never stated the clip was of the 3 innocent subjects portion of the experiment. Might be worth signposting that explicitly? I’ll retract my comment above, but I also suspect that others may make the same mistake that I did.
On introspection, I think the issue is that I read the “3 innocent subjects” bit, visualized it in my mind, got interested to see it play out, and spent 8 minutes waiting to see it on the video clip. Not seeing it, I just immediately thought, “oh, must have been an incorrect description of the video,” rather than going back to carefully think about your wording. So definitely my bad, but also a mistake I think some others are likely to make, and which may be worth anticipating as a writer. Note to self for any future blog posts with embedded video!
This also feels quite important to me. My current model is that a room with 2+ innocent participants plus a fire alarm would pretty reliably result in people taking the right action.
Agree the difference between actors and real companions is very important! I think you misread me (see response to AllAmericanBreakfast’s above comment.)
Your current model appears to be wrong (supposing people should respond to fire alarms quickly).
From the paper:
”Subjects in the three naive bystander condition were markedly inhibited from reporting the smoke. Since 75% of the alone subjects reported the smoke, we would expect over 98% of the three-person groups to contain at least one reporter. In fact, in only 38% of the eight groups in this condition did even 1 subject report (p < .01). Of the 24 people run in these eight groups, only 1 person reported the smoke within the first 4 minutes before the room got noticeably unpleasant. Only 3 people reported the smoke within the entire experimental period.”
Fig 1 in the paper looks at a glance to imply also that the solitary people all reported it before 4 minutes.
Oh, very interesting. I will take a look at the paper in the next few days. That does seem like it contradicts with my beliefs!