Inhibition of Sight

Written in 2019

According to Abdal-Hakim Murad, Twitter handle, @Contentions, "Modernity has not healed our pain; it has only dried our tears." To which end do we become inhibited by the pain of others? Can we observe our behaviors as a cognitive failure or societal deterioration? I explore this phenomenon with Bibb Latane and Judith Rodin's psychological examination of helping behavior in the following reflection.

Bibb Latane and Judith Rodin's experiment focuses on the opposite effect where they test the inhibition of helping behavior for individuals in separate social settings. These included subjects being placed in situations where a woman was in need. They were placed with a nonreactive confederate– an otherwise intentionally unresponsive individual or a stranger–whom the subjects had never met and or in pairs as friends. The results illustrated an increased inhibition in all three social settings. Thus, the notion of "Strength in numbers," as mentioned in Latane and Rodin's study (1969), was thoroughly measured, suggesting that humans in greater populations would ignore those in need instead of smaller people. I find the results to be reflective of human behavior, especially within the city of Chicago.

Chicago is estimated to be populated by 2.75 million people. According to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, roughly 80,000 homeless individuals are a population. To avoid the nature of psychic numbing (Slovic, 2007), in perspective, the homeless population is 7.3 times the size of Loyola's undergraduate population( 10,906).

A common sight in the Windy City– or any given city granted–includes the homeless person holding a sign or asking for help while people step around. Often, someone will provide a dollar, and someone will hand out prayers; however, most of the time, we choose to ignore them. According to Latane and Rodin, these are mere examples of social influences (198) that perpetuate our actions. While everyone around us chooses to put their air pods in and look on their phone or read a tweet while walking by someone in need, we interpret those actions as the "acceptable" action. Therefore, we are influenced to act within the norm and ignore the homeless individual in need. These social influences can lead to pluralistic ignorance (199), where the bystander in a group is induced by the lack of concern of surrounding individuals, thereby perceiving the situation as less serious than if they were to be alone. Another focus for Latane and Rodin includes the Diffusion of Responsibility (198). These are measured in the level of rewards and costs(199) associated with each alternative outcome. If you were the only person walking on State street and you chose to ignore someone in need, you become 100% responsible for the guilt associated with your lack of action and vice versa. Whereas if five people were walking down the same street, you would, in comparison, hold 20% of the responsibility. The less the commitment, the easier it is to resolve one's internal conflict(guilt, remorse, disappointment).

The art I chose to design depicts a range of social influences compared to how pluralistic ignorance is demonstrated. The digital painting uses a dark palate to correlate the environment to the people drawn in black. The city and the people are textured in black matte to portray the congruency of the town and the characters. People frequently rely on the concrete jungle environment to guide their attention to what goes on around them. The people were drawn without lifting my pen to illustrate a line that connects everyone. The string symbolizes the unspoken relationship that the characters share; in this case, the shared action of ignoring the person in need allows others to validate their nonresponsive action. The weight of responsibility is not placed entirely on one person but rather on the seven individuals in the piece, as indicated by the burgundy outline on the lines and their feet. The only character with color in this piece is intentionally glossed with gold and burgundy. Burgundy is used to symbolize the suffering in survival. The dark color contrasted along the arms, sign, and cup indicates the dynamic between humanity's suffering and the negligence of the common good. The homeless character represents society, and the color gold represents the radiance of the common good if one so chooses to act.

The choice to ignore those in need reflects our environment and interpretation. As we look to others who cast a blind eye to suffer, especially on the busy streets of Chicago, we have to ask ourselves why?

According to stories such as the Good Samaritan, the priest and Levite choose to ignore someone in need on separate occasions until the good Samaritan comes to his aid. Just as Siddhartha's men missed a starving man until Siddhartha himself came upon him.

Given this, what causes the Good Samaritan and Siddhartha to act against the cognitive dissonance and fulfill the common good? At first pass, one might conclude the individual must be different from all the rest— they possess some special morality apart from the collective group identity. While this is possible, is it equally likely that the individual realized their collective identity within humanity that compelled them to act?

Contributions

Latane, B., & Rodin, J. (1969). A Lady in Distress: Inhibiting Effects of Friends and Strangers on Bystander Intervention1 . Journal of Experimental Social Psyhology , 5, 189–202. doi: 10.1016/0022-1031(69)90046-8

Slovic, P. (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgement and Decision Making , 2, 79–95. doi: 10.1007/978-90-481-8647-1_3

up26. (2018, July 9).

Population of Chicago 2019. Retrieved from https://uspopulation2019.com/population-of-chicago-2019.html.

Art- Tenzing Sherpa