Nice New Yorkers

Usually on a crowded subway train, I chose not to sit down. Even if I have the chance to squeeze in between two space deprived passengers, I know that one of the other people standing is just dying for a seat. I have had those days myself. After working 13 or 14 hours and walking to midtown the west side and back, there is not a single seat on the train. So using some backwards an inexplicable logic, I have decided that when I don't need the seat I want to let others have it. But, what if I were to ask some one to get up on that one day that I did need the seat? Is it possible that they would just give it to me? Probually. This article shows that New Yorkers are nicer than they make us out to be. Even though it is an unwritten rule that the subway is"first come first serve" I found it interesting that when asked, most riders gave up their seats with little question or complaint.

New York Times
'Excuse Me. May I Have Your Seat?'
Thirty years ago, they were wide-eyed, first-year graduate students, ordered by their iconoclastic professor, Dr. Stanley Milgram, to venture into the New York City subway to conduct an unusual experiment.

Their assignment: to board a crowded train and ask someone for a seat. Then do it again. And again.

"As a Bronxite, I knew, you don't do this," said Dr. Jacqueline Williams, now an assistant dean at Brooklyn College. Students jokingly asked their professor if he wanted to get them killed.

But Dr. Milgram was interested in exploring the web of unwritten rules that govern behavior underground, including the universally understood and seldom challenged first-come-first-served equity of subway seating. As it turned out, an astonishing percentage of riders - 68 percent when they were asked directly - got up willingly.

Quickly, however, the focus turned to the experimenters themselves. The seemingly simple assignment proved to be extremely difficult, even traumatic, for the students to carry out.

"It's something you can't really understand unless you've been there," said Dr. David Carraher, 55, now a senior scientist at a nonprofit group in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Kathryn Krogh, 58, a clinical psychologist in Arlington, Va., was more blunt: "I was afraid I was going to throw up."

More than three decades later, the memories are still surprisingly vivid, testimony perhaps to the trauma of their experience and an unintended postscript to a rare study on the delicate subway order.

Two weeks ago, a pair of reporters who set out to replicate the experiment struggled with similar inhibitions. The incredulous reactions they got from riders were the same as well. But they also stumbled upon convincing proof that New Yorkers have mellowed with time. The results were far from scientific, but, remarkably, 13 out of 15 people gave up their seats.