I have been polling a number of my friends recently on how they think they would react in a given situation. The situation in question actually occurred to me last Thursday in Turku, Finland, so I was eager to find out how they would have reacted.
What happened, in essence, was that I came across a crying girl, but didn't stop to offer any help. I was walking down one of the main streets in Turku city centre quite late at night, after everything had closed up for the night, when I heard loud sobbing. I looked up and saw a girl, who appeared to be Finnish, crying disconsolately and making no effort to hide this fact.
My first thought was that she must be very embarrassed to be walking around in such a state, and I reasoned that she wouldn't welcome any intrusion from a complete stranger (on the basis that, if I were in the same position, I wouldn't want strangers interfering). It then occurred to me that, even if I did stop her, she might not speak English, and I know only a handful of words in Finnish, so we might not be able to communicate and things would then become very awkward indeed.
By the time I had considered these things, the girl had passed me by and her sobbing was fading into the distance. I turned a corner, then changed my mind. I decided to go back and check that the girl was OK, but when I looked back down the street we had passed each other on, she was nowhere to be seen, so I continued back to my hotel.
I have been feeling guilty for not offering her any assistance. It is unlikely that she would have bumped into anybody else on her way, as there was nobody else around.
I believe in the notion of "what goes around comes around". I think that, had I stopped and offered help to that girl, it probably would have had a knock-on effect. I would have gone to bed feeling good about myself, and she might have been in a better mood around her family and friends. If nothing else, we might both have an interesting story to tell. Perhaps we might have discovered commonalities and become friends. As it is, I failed to act on time, and so I feel guilty and a girl in Finland felt sadder than strictly necessary. The world is a fractionally worse place.
In an attempt to assuage my guilt, I conducted the aforementioned survey of my friends. Interestingly, my male friends were generally of the opinion that they would have stopped to help, with the exception of one friend who had found himself in a similar situation recently and reported the same experience as mine. Of the girls asked, half said they would have stopped and half said they would have ignored her. Almost all of them said that they would only stop if certain conditions were met, including knowing that they were in no personal danger, checking that the girl wasn't drunk and, most memorably, depending on whether or not they were in a good mood!
My friend Kat had a particularly interesting view on the subject. She was of the opinion that whether or not somebody would stop would be dependent on how altruistic they are. I asked if somebody would be considered not altruistic for not stopping to help the girl, even if they then went on to do something else, such as help a blind man cross a street (because I have done this on a number of occasions and was trying to justify myself!). Her interesting premise concerns the level of personal involvement. Helping a man cross a street only involves taking his arm and walking him from one footpath to the other, whereas helping a crying girl will offer a certain amount of consolation, discussion, etc. If the girl's problems are severe, it might lead to a much greater commitment. The measure of a person's altruism is how personally involved they are prepared to get (this is quite paraphrased, so I hope she doesn't read this and conclude that I wasn't listening to her at all!).
On the surface, this seems like an excellent metric. It's easy to help the blind man, but not the crying girl. In the same way, it's easy to donate a small portion of your earnings to charity, but not so easy to volunteer your time to a charity project. Is Bill Gates more altruistic than my friend who works in a soup kitchen once a week? I would say it's probably the other way around. Even if Bill Gates spends more than one night a week on his charity foundation, he does so from the vantage point of being extraordinarily wealthy, whereas my friend is a college student.
So I think I will resolve to be more altruistic. I think that, in general, I am reasonably altruistic. For example, I have been known to spend several hours of my time helping various people with their computer problems (I really believe that what comes around goes around in computing - I am writing this in Firefox running on Ubuntu) because that is my area of expertise; on at least one occasion I have contributed cookies to a charity bake sale because I enjoy cooking; I generally tend to offer to translate for people who are having trouble making themselves understood because I am bilingual and have worked as both a translator and interpreter.
But I will offer to help with these things because they are my particular skills, or because I enjoy them. It's easy to be altruistic when it doesn't cost you much.
I went to the conference by myself, but I was fortunate enough to make some friends when I got there. A lot of people are alone and so people are quite receptive. I ended up hanging out with the people in this photo most nights.
Because it was a mediaeval banquet, we used a slice of flat bread, instead of a plate, and we didn't use forks, because they hadn't been introduced in Finland yet! We ate with our fingers instead. It was a lot of fun.
Our hosts for the evening were Duke John and his wife, Catherine of Poland (whom we had to address in Latin, the lingua franca - Vivant Iohannes et Caterina!!). They were played by some talented actors. They greeted us and entertained us with songs, and explained the customs of the period to us. It was probably the best dinner entertainment I've ever seen.
After a couple of different courses, Catherine of Poland introduced us all to a new, modern implement - the fork. After Duke John implored us all to be very careful with these dangerous new devices, the servants came out with huge trays of roast chicken and vegetables and we all received forks. Ironically, the chicken was in drumstick form and most people used their hands!
After the banquet ended, we went looking for something else to do. We came to a bar on the main square and drank until they closed at 3am. We then went next door to a late bar (!) and we were eventually joined by the waitress from next door, who I suspect was coming onto one of us, but she was too strange to tell! We eventually went back to our hotels at about 5am, in full daylight (Finnish summers are pretty great).
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