C. Daniel Batson

C. Daniel Batson

C. Daniel Batson is the second author of the 1973 Good Samaritan study, "From Jerusalem to Jericho", with John Darley. The study is the usual illustration of how a situational variable, here being in a hurry, can outweigh a religious motive in whether someone stops to help.

Who they are

Batson is a social psychologist. For this page the vault verifies only the 1973 paper, its authors and its publication details, which were confirmed at Crossref. No further biography has been confirmed from a primary source.

Key papers

  • Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). "From Jerusalem to Jericho": A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27(1), 100-108. doi:10.1037/h0034449

Key ideas

The 1973 paper with John Darley, according to its abstract, put people between two buildings where they met a shabbily dressed person slumped by the road. Those in a hurry were more likely to pass without stopping. Whether participants were about to give a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan or on a topic with no helping theme made no significant difference, and religious personality variables did not predict who helped. The character of the help given by those who did stop was related to their type of religiosity.

Malcolm Gladwell retells the study as one of seminary students passing a slumped, groaning man on the way to a talk. That setting and the participant counts are not in the abstract, which is all this site has read. The result concerns behaviour, not observers' judgement, and it comes from a single study whose replication this site has not assessed.

Sources

  1. Crossref record for doi:10.1037/h0034449; abstract read via OpenAlex.
  2. Gladwell, M. (2000). The Tipping Point. Little, Brown, pp. 163-165.