A Look at Human Nature

I'm going to get a little philosophical here for a few minutes, but I think its an interesting idea. Back in college I took a psychology 101 class during my senior year which required the creation and execution of a scientific study. My group decided to do an experiment to determine if drivers are more likely to stop at a crosswalk for someone on crutches.

Without going into too many boring details - we designed the experiment and had it approved by the professor. After a few hundred trials with a few different variables the results were in.

The hypothesis we developed was that drivers would be more likely to stop when seeing someone on crutches waiting to cross a crosswalk (versus our control which was someone without crutches waiting to cross). If an individual is on crutches they clearly have some sort of injury or ailment, and therefore we thought that drivers would have compassion for their situation and be more likely to stop and let them pass.

As it turns out, we had way too much confidence in our fellow humans. I don't have the paper with me at the moment - but the results clearly showed that drivers were much less likely to stop for someone on crutches. We hadn't thought of the fact that Americans always tend to be in a rush, so when faced the option of letting someone on crutches cross (who is going to take a longer time to cross than a normal person) - it seems they would much rather keep traffic moving. Wow...that's definitely not what I was expecting.

I remembered this study when I saw someone on crutches at the supermarket today. My buddies and I used to joke about carrying a spare pair of crutches around so we wouldn't have to wait at crosswalks for someone to stop...but as it turns out this would only make things worse. If you hurt yourself and are on crutches, not only do you have to suffer the pain and annoyance of the injury and crutches, people will also make you wait longer to cross the street!

So much for Brotherly Love, huh?