“A person who fails to help is not necessarily an uncaring person. A person who helps is not necessarily someone who possesses an enduring essence of goodness.”
In their famous Good Samaritan experiment, psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson replicated and, in a sense, amended the biblical parable.
They examined whether seminarians’ religious motivations—including whether religion served their own salvation or reflected a concern for others—would influence their willingness to help someone in distress.
Surprisingly, religious orientation did not significantly predict helping behavior. What mattered much more was whether the seminarians were in a hurry.
The findings invite us to reconsider the priest and Levite who passed by the injured man. Perhaps their failure to help was not simply a reflection of their moral character. Perhaps they, too, were running late.
The lesson is not that character or values are irrelevant, but that behavior cannot be adequately understood apart from the context in which it occurs.
Based on Darley and Batson (1973), as discussed in The Person and the Situation by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett.
