based purely on someone else’s ridiculous guesses.
“The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.
“So why, you may ask, do I go on talking, up here? Why go on, year after year, cashing the college’s checks?”
The laughs are all sympathy now. Adam admires the brilliant pedagogy. He, at least, he vows, will remember this lecture years from now, and its revelations will make him wiser, no matter what the studies show. He, at least, will defy the indicting numbers.
“Let me show you the answers you yourselves gave to a simple questionnaire I had you fill out at the beginning of the semester. You’ve probably forgotten you ever took it.” The professor glances at the average answers and grimaces. His lips tighten in pain. Snickers across the room. “You may or may not recall that I asked you then whether you thought you’d . . .” Professor Rabinowski fiddles with his tie. He windmills with his left arm, grimaces again. “Excuse me one minute.” He lurches off the dais and out the door. A murmur passes through the auditorium. Thuds come from the down hall—a stack of boxes tipping over. Fifty-four students sit and wait for the punch line. Faint, swallowed sounds fill the hallway. But no one moves.
Adam scans the seats behind him. Students frown at each other or busy themselves with notes. He turns to look at that magnificent woman who always sits two seats to his left. Premed, fawn-colored, pretty without knowing it, binders full of neat handwritten notes, and he thinks again how glorious it would be to sit in Bucky’s over a beer with her and talk about this astonishing class. But the semester ends in two days, and the chance is as good as lost.
She glances his way, confused. He shakes his head and can’t help smirking. He leans in to whisper, and she reciprocates. Maybe the chance hasn’t vanished. “Kitty Genovese. The bystander effect. Darley and Latané, 1968.”
“But is he okay?” Her breath is like cinnamon.
“Remember how we had to answer whether we’d help someone who . . . ?”
A woman shouts from below for someone to call an ambulance. But by the time the paramedics get their ambulance onto the quad, Professor Rabinowski is dead of a myocardial infarction.
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” the premed beauty says, in their booth at Bucky’s. “If you thought he was demonstrating the bystander effect, why did you keep sitting there?”
She’s on her third iced coffee, and it bothers Adam. “That’s not the point. The question is why fifty-three other people, including you, who thought he was having a heart attack, didn’t do anything. I thought he was jerking us around to make a point.”
“Then you should have been on your feet and calling his bluff!”
“I didn’t want to spoil the show.”
“You should have been up in five seconds.”
He slams the booth table. “It wouldn’t have made any damn difference!”
She flinches into the booth, like he meant to hit her. He puts up his palms, leans toward her to apologize, and she flinches again. He freezes, hands in the air, seeing what the cowering woman sees.
“I’m sorry. You’re right.” Professor Rabinowski’s last lesson. Learning psychology is, indeed, pretty much useless. He pays for the drinks and leaves. He never sees her again, except for the following week, from four seats away, for two hours, at the proctored final exam.
. . .
HE’S ADMITTED to the new social psychology graduate program down at Santa Cruz. The campus is an enchanted garden perched on a mountainside overlooking Monterey Bay. It’s the worst place he can imagine for finishing a doctorate—or doing any real work whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s perfect for making interspecies contact with sea lions down by the pier, climbing the Sunset Tree naked and stoned at night, and lying on his back in the Great Meadow, searching for a thesis topic in the mad clouds of stars. After two years, the other grads take to calling him Bias Boy. In any discussion of the psychology of social formations, Adam Appich, master of science, is there with several studies that show how legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in