Realidad Aumentada en el campo de la educación

General Introduction to studies

Within our society, greatly based on mass media and web-spreading communication, we are daily exposed to news, videos and images reporting on our fellow citizens involved in criminal and dangerous situations that, in some cases, include even episodes of murder. In front of this relative new way of sharing information, our reactions are likely to include an empathic feeling towards victims, together with the conviction that these situations can never occur in our own experience.

A dangerous situation not only is infrequent and often unpredictable, but it also requires an instant reaction. Precisely for this reason, several authors in the last decades have tried to understand how people will react when, for instance, hearing during the night a woman’s screams coming from the street (Latanè & Darley, 1986).

Queens, New York, 1964. Kitty Genovese is coming back home from work during the night when Winston Moseley, a necrophiliac serial killer, stabs, kills and rapes her in the middle of the street. Besides the several debates about the reliability of the news reported by local newspapers, at least one detail of this story is absolutely real: Kitty Genovese was raped while her neighbors were hearing her screams doing nothing to help and to rescue her from her consequent death. If on one hand, the news of a murder did not give rise to any surprise, especially in a city like New York in the 60s, on the other hand this tragic news caught great attention due to the neighbors’ failure to intervene. Kitty’s murder, indeed, lasted over half an hour and no one intervened to either rescue her or call the police.

Latanè and Darley (1986), in particular, have dedicated an extensive effort and resources in sorting out the possible reasons behind this failure of intervention. The authors found that the

In order to explain and clarify the reasons behind this phenomenon, these authors (1970) proposed a subtle psychological process that may occur when bystanders face a dangerous situation that calls for intervention. The model contemplates a five-step process, during which bystanders need to notice the situation; recognize it as an emergency; develop a feeling of responsibility, acknowledge own skills to succeed (see also Korte, 1971) and finally reach the decision to intervene. Based on this cognitive model, Latanè and Darley (1970) identified three further psychological processes that can affect the proposed sequence and can lead to the inhibition of helping: evaluation apprehension, pluralistic ignorance, and diffusion of responsibility. These psychological processes, respectively, refer to the fear of others’ judgment when acting publicly, the tendency to rely on the overt reaction of others to understand ambiguous situations and, finally, the tendency to diffusion of personal responsibility to help among the present bystanders. A decade later, Latanè and Nida (1981) reviewed the potential psychological processes responsible for the bystander effect, proposing three slightly different processes involved in increasing the inhibition of helping. They distinguished the processes of social influence (individuals look at others in order to define and interpret the situation and the expected pattern of behavior), audience inhibition (individuals are fearful that their behavior can be seen by others and evaluated negatively) and, again, diffusion of responsibility (a strategy to reduce the psychological cost associated with non- intervention). Furthermore, the authors also suggest that the bystander effect should be strongest when no one intervenes because everybody fails to recognize the emergency.

The reason behind the failure to intervene has been the focus of classical and recent research. Generally, one of the major finding is that the greater the number of bystanders in an emergency situation, the longer it takes for any single bystander to intervene and, at the same time, the less likely intervention becomes (Darley & Latanè, 1986). One aspect that could potentially interfere with the decision whether or not to intervene consisted in the cost and reward of the intervention (Mogy & Harris, 1971). Authors claimed that when bystanders have to decide whether to intervene or not, they consider if the outcomes (reward minus costs) associated with helping are more positive

than the outcomes associated with not helping. For instance, the perceived status of the victim (high vs. low) can have an impact on the decision of providing help: high-status victims can provide more rewards than equal- or low-status victims and for this reason bystanders should be more likely to assist a victim of high rather than low status (Mogy and Harris, 1971). During the last decades, however, the bystander effect has been investigated also from other perspectives such as evolutionary psychology and game theory proposing new and different underlying processes, such as reciprocal altruism (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981; Trivers, 1971) and competitive altruism (Hardy & Van Vugt, 2006). More recent studies demonstrate, moreover, that the bystander effect does not occur in two specific cases: when the emergency is a very dangerous one and when the bystanders feel highly competent to intervene (Clark & Word, 1974, Van Den Bos, Müller & Van Bussel, 2009, Fischer, Greitemeyer, Pollozek, & Frey, 2006).

Within this theoretical framework, I propose a novel approach, arguing that Word Order could be intrinsically linked to the perception of danger and to the likelihood of bystander intervention. The question addressed here is whether the order in which help requests (Study 4a) and the target of intervention (Study 4b) are disposed within a sentence may facilitate or interfere with the intention to intervene in dangerous situations.

Through two studies I tried to investigate the role of Word Order as a potential moderator in the likelihood of intervention. In the first study, I hypothesized that the order in which a help request is formulated affects the likelihood of intervention. By switching the order in which the pronoun “you” appears in the request (Pronoun-Verb ,PV, “Tu, aiutami”/“You, help me” vs. Verb- Pronoun, VP, “Aiutami tu”/ “Help me, you”6) people may feel more or less responsible. In particular, the diffusion of responsibility may decrease in the PV condition since the help request is strictly directed at the bystander by placing “You” in first position.

made. The hypothetical situations presented in this study varied in danger level and in the type of intervention needed. In some cases the potential intervention was directed at the source of the danger (“The flames expand in the woods”), in other cases at a specific victim in need (e.g., “a woman cries at the park”). All sentences consisted of a subject (S; the target of intervention), a Verb (V) and a complement (C). The main question investigated here was whether the willingness to intervene and the speed with which this decision was made would be greater in reaction to SVC sentences (“a woman cries at the park”) than to CVS sentences (“in the park, a woman cries”).