The effects of bystander's anonymity, situational ambiguity, and victim's status on helping.

Summary Milgram has suggested that urban dwellers are overloaded with sensory input. They adapt to this situation by ignoring low priority inputs. This would cause urban people to be anonymous, and possibly affect their willingness to help. In Study 1, it was argued that anonymous people are freed from social pressure to behave normatively, and hence, it was predicted that anonymity would discourage helping behavior. In a laboratory setting, groups of three strangers (one S and two confederates), supposedly taking part in an ESP study, witnessed an emergency. Groups in the anonymous-hood condition wore hoods and lab coats, while those in the identifiable condition wore ordinary clothes and introduced themselves to one another. A third set of groups (identifiable-hood) served as a control for the effects of the hoods per se. As predicted, helping was significantly slower and significantly less likely in the anonymous-hood condition than in the identifiable condition. In the second study, the overload notio...