Good Samaritans in experiments
Consider 2 people. Both are seminary students who are taking part in an experiment ostensibly to consider different types of religiosity. One is asked to prepare a short talk on the Good Samaritan, the other on potential future careers for seminar graduates. They are both told to go to another room to record their talk. The one who is to be giving a talk on the Good Samaritan is told that he is late and needs to hurry. The other participant is told that he has a time to spare. If they, separately, come across someone who appears to be in respiratory distress, which do you think is more likely to stop and help? Does being in a hurry determine whether someone helps? Does reading the Good Samaritan? Which is a bigger effect? I was recently told about an experiment which showed that seminary students who had just prepared to give a talk about the Good Samaritan were no more likely to help someone in need than those who had been preparing a talk about an unrelated topic. This seemed unexpected to me – people who had just been reading and thinking about a story which was told specifically by the leader of their faith to instruct them to help other people were no more likely to help than the control? I know humanity is crazy but seemed like a new level of crazy which I wouldn’t have predicted. So I thought I’d check out the study and – Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! I know getting overly upset about bad experiments (especially those from before the replication crisis) is probably bad for my health but still – Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! I don’t want to be too harsh on the authors as this probably isn’t the worst culprit you’ll see but – Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! The paper has 1811 citations listed on google scholar – Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! I’m tempted to pretend that this post has some purpose other than just as a release of my frustration but that would be dishonest. Please consider this post a form of therapy for me. The working titl
In this post John describes a method by which functioning democracies can attempt to prevent tyranny of the majority - giving each major faction a de-facto veto over new legislation.
Whilst this is a method used in some countries, it is by no means the only, or indeed the most common, method for achieving this. I am only properly familiar with the UK as a counter-example but Dumbledore's army lists Frace, Germany, Italy and Canada as some others.
The method described in the post is likely more useful in situations where there are 2-3 major factions, whose values are incompatible with each other (slavery in pre civil-war US, religion/ethnic background in Iraq, religion/national identity... (read more)