What Would You Do? With Kean P.U.L.S.E.

By Mallory Helmes | Published by October 11, 2021

They say kindness is contagious but does it truly spread quickly?

On September 14,  Kean Programming for Unique and Lively Student Experience (P.U.L.S.E), a student-run event planning organization, decided to put this saying to the test.

When Maria Irvin, a junior studying communications in media and film and vice president of KeanTV, was walking back to her car to leave for the day, she noticed a group of students drop a bunch of papers on the ground.

She immediately ran over to help and was surprised to learn that they had dropped their papers on purpose. The students told her that they were celebrating “Act of Kindness Day” and rewarded her for her kindness with a notepad, marker, and a phone wallet with the Kean University logo on it.

Irvin took her rewards and walked away, consumed with confusion and happiness.

“I felt like I was on the show What Would You Do? And I was just waiting for John Quiñones to come out and ask me all about what had just happened,” said Irvin.

Ironically enough Fabiana Soto-Gallego, member and coordinator for Kean P.U.L.S.Es’ Global Cultural Civic National Events (GCCN), and Katherine Pujols member and assistant coordinator for GCCN, said that John Quiñones was a part of the inspiration for this social experiment.

“We were searching ideas for events and we found out about Kindness Day and we were like let’s build off of that and then I remembered that guy, John Quiñones, who’s always like ‘What would you do?’ and I was like we can be John Quiñones and so that’s kind of how the idea built into this like, what would you do in this situation event,” said Soto-Gallego.

According to Soto-Gallego, it was decided that if a student would help a P.U.L.S.E member, then they would be deemed as kind and receive rewards like phone chargers and face masks.

If students did not help, they would move on and attempt the test again. They also decided to give out rewards to students who they saw or heard doing something kind that day.

Soto-Gallego and Pujols, while excited about this social experiment, admitted to being nervous about how this experiment would be received by students.

“We were definitely nervous just because you never really know how the students are going to react to an event. There’s always someone who might get offended or something might go wrong so there are a lot of angles that go into it…so it was like either this event is going to go really well or it’s going to flop and just not happen,” said Soto-Gallego.

Luckily for the organization though most of their results led to the actions of students being kind and helping them when they dropped their papers. They also felt like the experiment was successful in yielding the most honest results because most students were unaware of the social experiment that they were conducting.

When asked about their best and worst reactions the two students immediately turned to each other giving each other a look that signified that they both had the same answers in mind.

The students said the best reaction of the day happened in the Miron Student Center (MSC) near Auntie Anne’s and SmashBurger.

They explained that a woman had her hands full with a variety of things while also speaking on the phone. It was then that Pujols fell dropping her papers everywhere and the woman with her hands already full immediately bent down to help Pujols with picking up the papers while also dropping some of the things that she was holding in her hands.

“It was just an immediate getting down, picking everything up and helping Kat out,”  said Soto-Gallego. “And then we ended up giving her the prize and all of that and she had said that we made her day and she was just like smiling from ear to ear just by the fact that we had given her something and she hugged us and she thanked us. That was the best reaction that we got.”

The worst reaction occurred when they were walking by the clock tower on campus. Soto-Gallego explained that she had genuinely fallen on the ground during this encounter, sending her papers flying everywhere, when a group of four girls heading straight towards her broke off into two pairs each and walked completely around her ignoring her altogether.

“It was literally like the parting of the sea like I was literally in the middle and they just went around,” said Soto-Gallego.

One of her co-workers was so shocked by the actions of the girls that she ran up to them to explain the social experiment that they were conducting and how they should have helped. The girls “were like yeah, no, and continued to walk away,” said Soto-Gallego.

Some bad reactions, though, weren’t enough to deter the two students and they said their organization definitely wanted to do more social experiments like this one in the future. Their end goals were to get students involved and spread awareness about being kind to others; a goal that definitely made it into the net.

“I think there’s definitely kind people on campus. I think the more we celebrate that, the more it’s going to spread,” said Soto-Gallego.

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