The Sling Ruse (Patreon)

Back in 2021, my friend Leto MK researched and wrote the following interesting post on the KITA Facebook page about Bundy's sling ruse. I've uploaded an interesting addendum to the story-- after the Lake Sammamish false injury ruse became well publicized, someone called the King County Police tip line. The caller described a sling ruse discussion in a UW social psychology course, and his tip happened to be right on the money-- this was the same class that Bundy took in 1970. Dr. Ezra Stotland co-taught the class with Dr. Canon. Dr. Stotland wrote Ted a letter of recommendation to law school and would have known he'd been a Psych 345 student. The police follow-up, unfortunately, seemed to focus on Lance Canon himself rather than cross-referencing students from the class against potential suspect lists. Arguably, the King County Police dropped the ball investigating this one.
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Psychology Professor Lance K. Canon (1939-1981) joined the University of Washington in 1965, following receipt of his PhD from Stanford University. In the General Catalog of the UW for 1970-1972, we find Canon teaching the following courses to Psychology undergraduates: Psychological Aspects of Poverty, Social Psychology, Social Psychology of Prejudice, Social Influence and Attitude Change, and Consistency Theories in Social Psychology.

In the early 1970s, Canon -together with his associate Dr. Kenneth E. Mathews Jr. (1942-2011) of the Seattle Law and Justice Planning Office- instigated a project aiming to measure the effect of ambient noise on the helping behavior of individuals - that is, the effect of environmental noise on people's willingness or reluctance to provide assistance to strangers in need. The findings of that seminal project are still cited in many urban planning studies to this day. Although the first official publication of their findings didn't happen until 1975, by which time Canon had transferred to the University of New Hampshire, Canon would often discuss the progress of the project with his students as far back as 1970.

The 1975 publication presents the experiment, which consisted of two parts. For the first part, individuals who had agreed to participate were asked to wait to be called in for the start of the procedure, unaware that the experiment had already begun in the waiting room: an assistant to the researchers was sitting in the same room, supposedly waiting to be called in, all the while holding a stack of books, journals, and papers in his lap. After getting called in, the assistant would stand up and begin walking across the room, awkwardly dropping his materials on the floor, scattering them all around him. The aim was to see how many people would be coming to the assistant's aid.

The second part of the experiment introduced a visual cue to the legitimacy of the individual being in need: in half of the experiments, the assistant was wearing a full-length cast on his arm. The experiment was repeated in both high- and low-noise conditions.

The researchers concluded: "With increasing ambient noise levels, the likelihood of simple helping behavior decreases. An interaction was present in that the physical characteristics of the [assistant] which provided visual cues regarding the legitimacy and degree of his need for assistance, influenced the likelihood of his being helped in the low- but not in the high-noise conditions of the field study." In low-noise conditions, 80% of subjects wanted to help the person wearing the cast; in stark contrast, when he wasn't wearing a cast, only 20% of subjects approached to help him.

Bundy entered the University of Washington in mid-1970 to study Psychology. He graduated with Distinction in 1972. In 1972, he applied for a job with the Seattle Crime Prevention Commission with the recommendation of psychologist Dr. Donna Schram - a colleague of Dr. Mathews Jr. - who was researcher and evaluator with the Law and Justice Planning Office. Dr. Canon himself confirmed to his friend C.R. Roberts, a columnist with the Tacoma News Tribune, that Bundy had been one of his students.