Ethical Experiments

The first What Would You Do? scenario involves a traumatizing right of passage experienced by many teenagers. Three mean girls torment and taunt another girl in a public park. "You are such a loser, Katherine," they say. "You don't have any friends." The girls are actors, but the men and women strolling through the park have no idea. What do they do?

While many of the men who observe the scene simply keep walking, John notes that many women feel obligated to stop. One after another, women step up to give the mean girls a piece of their minds. Two strangers even work in tandem—one comforts the victim while the other sets the mean girls straight. Although the actors were told to keep their language clean, some of the women who stop have no qualms about cursing and even revert to mean girls themselves by mocking the girls.