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Too often we hear of people in distress being ignored by passers-by.
Situations where no one wanted to “get involved” exist in everything from verbal racial attacks and domestic violence to medical emergencies. But humans are supposed to be sentient beings, capable of empathy, sympathy and kindness. We’re supposed to help each other. So how does this happen?
The bystander effect is an unpleasant social phenomenon where, in an emergency or if someone needs assistance, the greater the number of people around the less likely those people are to help, according to Barbara.
“So if you collapsed on a street in the middle of a city, the more people there are around you, the more likely they are to step over you. In a small country town where there’s one or two people walking past, they would be more likely to stop and help.”
Bystander effect was originally known as the Genovese syndrome after a 1964 murder in New York City where 28 year-old Kitty Genovese was robbed, raped, and stabbed to death outside her apartment building. The attack took place over 30 minutes, and was seen or heard by a reported 38 witnesses. Nobody called the police, nobody shouted out, nobody helped.
It was such a horrendous case of public apathy it made headlines in the New York Times, sparking widespread public outcry and inspiring psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane to investigate the concept, later known as the bystander effect.
Darley and Latane went on to examine bystander reactions in a number of social experiments.
Actors were planted among varying numbers of subjects in a room where smoke seeped from under a door. The investigators found people alone in the room would react quickly, calling out or seeking help. But when subjects were surrounded by actors who didn’t move, they too ignored the potential threat.
In another scenario a woman could be heard crying out from another room that she had hurt her leg. When alone in the room 70 per cent of subjects reacted, but when an apathetic actor was present that dropped to seven.
There have been many cases over history where bystanders have failed to help; victims have been racially abused on public transport while other passengers have sat by and not responded; during the Rwandan Civil War the global community took too long to react to widespread genocide and up to a million people were killed; some six million European Jews died in the holocaust. The bystander effect can happen on a massive scale, sometimes with devastating consequences.
So why are people so reluctant to help each other? Some of the causes are well-known, and fairly understandable.
“The flight, fright, frozen, freeze reaction is a basic human response – people do tend to run away or freeze,” says Barbara.
“Also, group think describes the idea that we take our cues from others to assess the situation. If an alarm goes off in a shopping centre people will look around to see if anyone else is reacting: if no one else thinks it is an emergency then maybe it’s not.”
There’s also diffusion of responsibility.
“We gauge whether we’re equipped to respond, for example we might drive past a car accident and think if we’re not a nurse or doctor the emergency services can deal with it,” she says.
“Often people will only step in if they feel qualified to do so, like Adelaide anaesthetist and cave diving expert Dr Richard Harris, when he heard about 12 boys trapped in a cave in Thailand earlier this year.”
People who don’t feel they have the skills, however, won’t step in. But ironically, it only takes one person to step in and then others will follow suit.
There is only a small chance that the right person will be there at that moment, so even if someone is not qualified or experienced, they can still make a phone call or get outside help.
Another factor is ambiguity. “Sometimes it’s not clear if a situation is an emergency, or how you can help. If someone had a heart attack nearby and you’d had CPR training, you’d know what to do, but if someone was lying on the street looking dishevelled, or in a domestic violence situation, it may be hard to gauge how to help, or if you should at all.”
And then there’s safety – people may feel threatened if they step in. We sometimes hear of cases where genuine heroes get hurt, like a surgeon in a Melbourne hospital who was allegedly king hit after approaching a group regarding smoking in a non-smoking area. He died when his life support was switched off four weeks after the incident.
According to Barbara, the safety issue is frequently raised in discussion at Symes Group bystander effect workshops. Many people in Sydney tell of being verbally or physically abused for helping somebody out. Interestingly, they say it wouldn’t stop them from helping again.
“Sometimes too, a lack of general empathy may be a factor. Judgement may be clouded by unconscious bias, as outlined in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.”
Gladwell describes studies into the speed at which we make judgements. In prehistoric times, humans needed to react quickly to perceived threats but today we continue to make snap judgements when our survival is no longer at stake. Our modern lives are busy so we make quick judgements about who we help and who we care about, and the people we neglect or ignore are those who we judge. A UK study involving an actor lying on steps in a public place showed that passers-by would react differently according to his appearance. If he was dishevelled or unkempt they would walk past, but if he was wearing a business suit they would stop and try to get help.
Charity fatigue in Australia means our empathy often switches off. The many charities and causes in our society mean we can only afford to care about a few of them.
The bystander effect appears to be widespread and ingrained. But according to Barbara, the news is not all bad.
“It doesn’t seem to be getting worse.”
Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than You Think, explores that. The book opens with a short survey about global social issues like poverty.
“Global poverty has gone down, access to water and sanitation is better than ever, leaders are more accountable, we’re quicker to react to humanitarian crises and there is a bigger focus on social innovation, but we think the world is in a worse place.”
Research in 2011 on the bystander effect replicated the experiments done in the 60s, but with a difference. Researchers noticed that the early studies weren’t entirely representative of human behaviour and found that if one person stepped forward and did something, others would follow suit.
What those later studies showed was the answer is just do something, anything. “As long as you feel safe, do something. Make a phone call, go and get someone else if you don’t feel safe. It might mean you go and speak to the person in distress, or call the police. Whatever it is, if you do something it’s better than nothing.” That something might just make all the difference.