Chapter 3:
Chapter 3 presents evidence proving that Lauren Slater really is a little bit crazy. Slater presents a study, performed by David Rosenhan in the early 1970s, in which sane people infiltrated insane asylums by feigning insanity and then test how long until the doctors realized that they were actually sane. Rosenhan recruits eight buddies and has each of them fake the same symptoms, which are hearing a voice say “thud,” hopefully leading to being admitted as a psych patient. The pseudopatients are instructed to be truthful about every other aspect of their life and once they are admitted, they are supposed to act as if they are completely fine. Rosenhan and the other participants reported back that they were treated with disdain and witnessed verbal and physical abuse of other patients. One of the most interesting things that the pseudopatients said was that the other patients seemed to always know that the pseudopatients were not really insane.
Before Rosenhan conducted his research experiment, two scientists had conducted a related experiment. R. Rosenthal and L. Jacobson did an experiment where a fake IQ and aptitude test was administered to students. Some students were labeled as students that were on the verge of a large increase in intelligence, while other students were labeled as normal students. After one year, the students who were labeled as growth students had indeed significantly improved. This result could be attributed to having extra attention and situational context from the teacher who expected them to do well. This result could also be attributed to the students thinking that they were smarter than they are so they might have tried significantly harder.
We also hear tales of how Lauren Slater was herself a depressed psychiatric patient when she was younger. This information explains some things about her odd writing style. Slater attempts to reproduce Rosenhan’s experiment in the present day which yielded interesting results. Slater visited eight different psychiatric emergency rooms over an eight day period explaining the exact same symptoms as the pseudopatients in Rosenhan’s experiment. While she was diagnosed as depressed, she was not admitted and was not treated poorly. In fact, she seems to have felt extremely guilty because of how well she was treated and how genuinely concerned the doctors appeared to be.
Chapter 4:
Chapter 4 is dedicated to telling the story of a strange New York City crime, where a woman is savagely raped and murdered over a 35 minute period. The strangest part of the event is that thirty-eight witnesses heard or saw the assault taking place and none of them helped in any way. John Darley and Bibb Latane are two psychologists who study people in emergencies and the reasons why they might deny the existence of the emergencies. John Darley is from New York University and Bibb Latane is from Columbia University. They devise an experiment where an innocent subject participates in a group therapy session where two to six people are in separate rooms and are given turns to talk to the group through a microphone. The other participants are actually recordings and one has a severe form of epilepsy, which they casually and nonchalantly announced to the group during an earlier rotation. Eventually, the epileptic subject announces that they are having a seizure and then repeatedly ask for help over a six minute period. Less than thirty-five percent of the subjects seeked help when they believed that there were four or more participants in the group. If the subjects believe that they are the only ones in the group with the epileptic subject, then eighty-five percent of the subjects seek help immediately.
This result is very interesting, because it suggests that the same amount of responsibility can be shared across a group, instead of being amplified as some people might think it would be. Personally, I would think that people would be more likely to help if they were in a larger group, but these reports and studies prove that it is exactly the opposite. Now that I have read about these situations, I can think of times when I have been faced with a situation where I have been shamed into inactivity by the social cues of a crowd. The main example that comes to mind is last week when an armed suspect was seen on campus with a gun in his waistband. The Code Maroon alert said that the suspect was near the University Central Garage (UCG), which is right by Kyle Field, the MSC, Rudder Tower, and Koldus. I was in the MSC, among hundreds of other students, and I noticed that other people were getting the same Code Maroon notifications that I was. However, people kept on going on like normal. Sometimes you would notice people looking around and observing what other people were doing. In this situation, I think that the primary factor influencing our lack of activity was the idea of not knowing what to do. Do you leave and potentially run into the armed suspect? Or do you stay put, in a large group, where you think you will be safe? Do you hide? Well, all of us were stuck in a state of inactivity and did absolutely nothing. How peculiar.
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