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"Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. [...] Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say "I know you, Al. You're not the kind of man who.""
-From Straight Man by Richard Russo, pp. 373-374
I recently watched the Frontline documentary "Storm over Everest" about the 1996 tragedy. I had also read Krakauer's account, and read a little about it online. Regardless of who actually did what, I found it fascinating to think about how it must have felt for those people up there to find out how they would act under such dire circumstances.
In the Frontline documentary, Beck Weathers (who was left for dead twice and climbed down with completely frostbitten hands, feet, and nose) claims that in that awful situation, people's true character was revealed. I'm not sure I agree that we are what we do in the most stressful situations, but I do think those actions revealed a small part of those people's characters, and a part that they could not have seen of themselves otherwise.
Many of us have probably had similar experiences on a much smaller scale. I remember when I was in graduate school my friends played a trick on me to see whether I would conform (similar to the famous Asch experiment in which a group of confederates claimed that a short line was longer than a long line and then the experimenter watched to see whether the only real participant would go along with the group). I could have punched them for doing it to me, but it was interesting to find out how I would behave under that kind of peer pressure. Perhaps more common, we've all been on turbulent plane rides where we find out how courageous (or uncourageous) our friends and colleagues really are.
Luckily, most of us haven't been in situations that truly tested our courage, but I think many of us wonder how we would act. In the case of the Everest disaster, I don't have to wonder too hard - I know I would probably be cowering in the tents. But I suspect I'm not alone in wondering, for example, whether I would have "gone all the way" if I had been a participant in the Milgram experiment and a Yale professor was breathing down my neck telling me to shock another human being at dangerous levels.
When I was a graduate student my advisor had a very creative way of teaching students this lesson - that you can't know what you'll do until you do it. A week before the lecture on the bystander effect (the tendency for people not to act in the face of obvious harm to others), we asked my brother to lie face down, with his backpack on, just outside the only door to the lecture hall. He was sprawled out and the door hit his leg every time it opened - there was no doubt that he was not simply taking a little nap. Semester after semester, the students would file out, step over him, and go on to their next class. Once in a while someone would shout something at him or give him a little kick, but in my time in graduate school not more than one or two people (out of close to a thousand) ever came to us (the professor or the TA) to report the incident.
The next week, the professor discussed experimental findings and real life examples of people standing by as other people were suffering or in danger. He then asked the class to raise their hand if they think they would have intervened. Naturally most people raised their hands. Then he showed a slide of my brother, lying face down outside their classroom. The look on their faces at the moment of self-awareness was priceless.
This is not to condemn anyone who didn't help, or those who obeyed Milgram, etc. I'm fairly confident I would have failed all those tests myself. I am simply fascinated by that moment of self-insight. That moment when you realize "I'm (not) the kind of person who...".
