Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

142 Chapter 5
badly. How would you feel if you were one of the people who failed to
respond to a rape victim and then were told that you were just part of an experiment—that
no real rape ever took place, and thank you very much for your
help?
If you think some of these cases are borderline, consider the study by West
et al. (1975) on whether there is a little larceny in us all.
The Watergate Experiment
In the Watergate affair, men loyal to then President Richard Nixon broke
into the headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate Hotel in Washington,
D.C., to photograph documents pertinent to the 1972 election campaign.
Their bungling of the job, and the subsequent cover-up by Nixon and
his staff at the White House, led to the unprecedented resignation of the president
of the United States from office in 1974. Soon thereafter, West et al. conducted
their experiment.
They confronted 80 different students with a proposition to burglarize a
local advertising firm. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions.
In the first condition, participants were told that the job was to be done
for the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS, it seemed, needed to get the goods
on this company in order to bring them to trial for tax evasion. If the participants
were caught in the act, then the government would guarantee immunity
from prosecution. In the second condition, participants were told that there
was no immunity from prosecution.
In the third condition, participants were told that another advertising agency
had paid $8,000 for the job, and that they (the participants) would get $2,000
for their part in it. (Remember, that was $2,000 in 1979—about $8,000 today.)
Finally, in the fourth condition, participants were told that the burglary was
being committed just to see if the plan would work. Nothing would be taken
from the office.
Understand that this was not a ‘‘let’s pretend’’ exercise. Participants were
not brought into a laboratory and told to imagine that they were being asked
to commit a crime. This was for real. Participants met the experimenter at his
home or at a restaurant. They were all criminology students at a university and
knew the experimenter to be an actual local private investigator. The private
eye arranged an elaborate and convincing plan for the burglary, including data
on the comings and goings of police patrol cars, aerial photographs, blueprints
of the building—the works.
The participants really believed that they were being solicited to commit a
crime. Just as predicted by the researchers, a lot of them agreed to do it in the