Citation

Shotland RL, Stebbins CA. J. Appl. Soc. Psychol. 1980; 10(6): 510-527.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1980, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1559-1816.1980.tb00729.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The present study was designed to sugest sounds a woman might make that may attract the greatest amount of help. In the context of a simulated rape, the sounds that were tested were (1) a woman screaming "Help, rape, call the police"; (2) a woman screaming "fire"; (3) the sound of a whistle; and (4) a control consisting of the sounds of the struggle without one of the above messages. We concluded that when the situation provides little information bystanders help more frequently to "Help, rape" than to the "Fire" message. Under conditions of high information, Fire is the least successful message in attracting indirect help and we concluded that Fire is not statistically superior at attracting direct help. For logistical and other reasons, we feel that the "Help Rape" message is superior to the whistle sound. In addition, we found only a few people who would try to help directly by putting themselves at physical risk. These individuals were male, and felt assured that they could handle the physical conflict as a result of prior training (physical defense, varsity athletics, etc.). We concluded that direct help is not probable when environmental or sociological factors lead bystanders to expect a physical confrontation with the perpetrator of the attack as a cost of interfering. Thus we feel that further research should focus efforts at causing bystanders to contact the police, as recent evidence demonstrates that the police respond to "crime in progress" calls within 3 minutes in at least two major cities.