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researchers announced that they needed more information. The students would have to give a talk. Half of them were asked to deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan. The other half were told to discuss the job prospects that faced them as future ministers and were instructed to report to another building, where their audiences would be waiting for them. As the students left the first building, a researcher urged about a third of them to hurry, because they were already late. He assured another third that they were right on time but shouldn’t dawdle. He told the last third that there was a slight delay in the proceedings but that they should wander over anyway. As the students walked to the second building, they passed a man slumped against a doorway in an alley. They didn’t know it, but this was the real test. As each student approached, the man coughed and groaned. If the student stopped, the man told them in a confused and groggy voice that he was fine but he had a respiratory condition; he had taken medicine that would begin to work any minute now. If the student insisted on helping the man, he allowed himself to be taken into a building nearby.
    After the data was weighted and the variables analyzed, only one variable could be used to predict who would stop to help and who wouldn’t. The important factor was not personality type or whether a student’s career or the parable of the Good Samaritan was foremost in his mind. It was whether or not he was in a hurry. Personality had significance only among those students who stopped. Particularly empathetic students stayed with the man longer; those who were doctrinallyrigid forced him to drink a glass of water even when he said he didn’t want one. As for the effects of culture, Darley and Batson pointed out that it would be hard to name a cultural norm more powerful for a seminary student than the example of the Good Samaritan, but it still didn’t make a student more likely to stop.
    The study made it hard not to conclude, said Darley and Batson, “that ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.” The psychologists weren’t quick to judge these seminarians. Even though all the students who hadn’t stopped admitted that they’d seen the man, Darley and Batson pointed out, several said that they hadn’t realized that he needed help until after they’d passed him. Time pressure had narrowed their “cognitive map”; as they raced by they had seen without seeing.
    Meanwhile, the students who had realized that the man required assistance but had withheld it from him showed up for their talks looking “aroused and anxious.” Darley and Batson speculated that their subjects felt torn between their duty to help the man and their desire to live up to the expectations of the psychologists whose test they had freely agreed to take. “This is often true of people in a hurry,” Darley and Batson wrote. “They hurry because somebody depends on their being somewhere. Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”
 9. 
    T HE ONE THING I DO CONSISTENTLY on Friday nights is drink. I drink whether I’m at home or at a more traditionally laid Sabbath table or attending an entirely non-Jewish event that I couldn’t bring myself to pass up. I drink red wine, if I can, and right up to the line where looseness looks a lot like rudeness. Preferring not to think of myself as a weekly alcoholic, I tell myself that wine stands in for the Sabbaths I so rarely manage to keep. A full-bodied red wine is what a poet might call the objective correlative of the Sabbath, with the color of kosher wine I sipped as a child (though not the poisonous sweetness), thewarmth of the candles, the mollifying effect on critical consciousness that Ferenczi said Sunday ought to have.
    This is not precisely in the spirit of the Jewish Sabbath, but there is a family resemblance to it. The rabbis disapproved of drunkenness, but they also decreed that the