The effect of being responsible for reducing another's pain on subjects' response and arousal.

Sixty subjects were equally divided in a 2 X 2 experimental design into highversus low-apparent-shock delivery and responsible versus not responsible for another. The subjects' task in the responsible condition was to make a response that shortened the duration of a shock delivered to a model. High shock versus low shock referred to the level of apparent shock delivered to the model. Subjects' reaction time was faster when they had responsibility and was faster when apparent shock was greater. Skin conductance data indicated that subjects were vicariously aroused by high levels of apparent shock. There was no evidence of vicarious conditioning. When an individual is in a situation where he is responsible for the welfare of another, he often displays high levels of nervous tension (Milgram, 1963). In a similar vein, others (Bandura Berger, 1962) have demonstrated that observation of pain in a model results in the development of vicarious emotional responses in the observer. The present study combines aspects of those studies in an experiment in which subjects, while observing the delivery of a shock to another, were able to shorten the duration of that shock. Thus, subjects, while not responsible for the delivery of the aversive stimulus, were able to reduce its impact by making it shorter. It was anticipated that this procedure would permit the investigation of both vicarious emotional responses and the effect of being responsible for the delivery of another person from pain. The first behavior of interest in the experiment is the latency of the subject's shock termination response. There has been a discrepancy in the literature surrounding the effect of observing another being shocked on the observer's reaction time. DiLollo and Berger (1965) found that reaction time speed