Pushing past strangers at a train station. Placing rubbish on top of an already overflowing bin. Going ahead of others who have been waiting longer at the bus stop.
We can find ourselves doing all sorts of anti-social behaviours on a day-to-day basis, which we wouldn’t be proud of if looked at in isolation. Mostly they happen when we are running on autopilot and focused on other things.
At least, that was the hypothesis of a group of social psychologists from UCSC in Milan. They believed that unusual occurrences in the environment might “momentarily disrupt automatic patterns of attention and behavior, increasing individuals’ awareness of their surroundings and the needs of others.”
In other words, if you are used to sitting in your seat on the train and ignoring others, you might continue to do so even when you know rationally that you should stand for someone in need. On the other hand, if something breaks you out of your commuter reverie and into the present moment, you might behave pro-socially.
To test this intriguing hypotheses, the researchers needed some costumes. First, a female researcher wore a prosthetic to appear pregnant. She boarded the Milan metro, with a colleague observing anonymously.
On the metro of Milan (population: 8+ million), it turns out that someone will get up for a pregnant woman just 38% of the time. The researchers did the experiment 138 times, just to make sure.
They then repeated the experiment. But this time, in addition to the pregnant woman and the observer, Batman also got on board. That is to say, a man in a full Batman suit got on board, mask in hand by his side, as though he were an actor returning home from a long day of filming.
Although Batman was minding his own business, the commuters must have been shocked out of autopilot mode, because this time the pregnant woman was offered a seat a slightly more respectable 67% of the time.
According to the researchers, “findings suggest that unexpected events can promote pro-sociality,” “breaking routine scripts” and “with implications for encouraging kindness in public settings.”
Personally, I don’t think this was just any “unexpected event”: no anime cosplayer or sports mascot could trigger the superego quite like Batman. But that’s a hypothesis for a different era of psychologist.
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