Surveillance cameras debunk the bystander effect

A lie can truly travel around the world three times before the truth has got its boots on.

That sounds less like "wildly exaggerated" and more like just plain wrong in every way.

It's not a coincidence that the 'original story' completely elides any negligence or wrongdoing by the police.

On The Media did a good episode on this https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/131359-the-witnesses-that-...

Even if it were true, there's a more charitable and in my opinion more plausible explanation: people are afraid to bother the emergency line with redundant calls. These days it's probably more plausible than ever, because we hear of prank calls to the emergency line and don't want to occupy the emergency line more than necessary.

> people "these days" don't care about each other, society is falling apart etc.

Interesting point.It was 1964. The same people that complain about the current generation.

I think that it's great that this myth of debunked. People wants to be good. Give people education and means and they will run a society smoothly.

There is a very interesting small read from Georg Simmel written in 1903 called “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in which the Berlin based Simmel tries to describe how the new mega-cities influence the mind of it’s inhabitants. Even now, more than a century later his text still works.

However only up to a degree — many people like to take some sort of preceived trend (”people are getting more emotionally cold”) and extrapolate it into the future. This extrapolation becomes part of their Weltbild and because we like it when our anecdotes line up with our Weltbild, we start to leave out facts that don’t.

Does it mean that Simmel’s general idea that cities affect people is wrong? Probably not. It is just not as big of a thing as many make themselves belive it is.

Relatedly, if you ever need to delegate something like a 911 call, you're supposed to single out a person and tell them, specifically "you, go dial 911" rather than shouting "someone call 911!"

Apparently this makes it far more likely to actually happen.

When I worked support at a university, in the dim and distant past, it was our responsibility to clear the labs if a fire alarm went off. Students did just generally sit there until they were told to move.

I think if you have more than a dozen people in your org, it's a good idea to appoint a couple of them (in case one is on vacation/off sick/the arsonist) as fire wardens. Not least you have someone who is actually counting who is there so the fire service can get an idea of who might still be in the building.

Of course 99.9% of the time it doesn't matter, but that 0.1% can be very important.

Yup, this is why you need to appoint fire marshals (and first aid) people at a workspace - you have to tell them that if the alarm goes off, this is their job and responsibility.

I mean in theory any alarm should make people panic a bit and start making their way to the exit, but in practice most alarms are false alarms so people don't know if they need to act.

> just give a random person a "uniform" (a whistle, a badge, a hat, or a vest, anything simple like that works) and tell them that when the alarm goes off, they are responsible for telling people to leave.

What an absolutely strange procedure! This as a fire marshal is not responsible for getting people out. People themselves are responsible to act. The fire marshal is a backup!

Here people (big building, multiple companies, etc) are told when they get hired that it's their responsibility to evacuate when the (standardized across Europe) evacuation sound goes off. Then trained people check floors to double check everyone is out, plus assist anyone having difficulty getting out. Anyone not cooperating will be reported.

This all relies on the attitude of the director of each company. Some take safety very seriously, some see it as a waste of time ("nothing will happen").. until eventually something happens.

  when the alarm went off, we all looked
  at each other for a few moments [...]
  After awhile we decided we'd better
  get going so we all lazily strolled
  outside.

That's normal and expected; in most large buildings in my country, there is a weekly fire alarm test, so of course no-one sprints for the door during the first 60 seconds of hearing the siren. It's not like there's visible smoke or flames.

In a way it's even desirable; no-one's getting trampled or crushed when people leave the building at a walking pace.

At a previous employer, I went through the "Emergency Responder" training, which meant that I also kept a reflective orange vest at my desk, with an appropriate label on the back.

We had fire drills where the list of people who knew about the drill-to-come was intentionally kept to a tiny handful of people, usually just one person per floor. When the alarm went off, it was up to us to go into Fire Marshal mode and direct people to leave through the stairs, stay to the right because the fire department personnel will be coming up the inside, etc....

That process was actually surprisingly effective. I was a good choice because I can be a very loud person, when I want. I have maxxed out my SPL meter at 127dBA, and I've checked into what it would take to make an official go at getting the worlds record for "loudest person".

We should also consider that if there's a larger crowd of bystanders, an individual will feel more sure that others will help them as long as they act. "Safety in numbers" so to say.

On the first point, I believe the study used surveillance footage so it's likely the majority of people would've been unaware they were being filmed.

> decrease of probability that a particular individual will act, with decrease in group size

I believe the study did show that. I heard an interview with one of the authors on the radio (so my memory may be faulty).

So I don't think it really debunked the bystander effect, rather he made a point along the lines of, 'it doesn't really matter, the more people present means it's the more likely that one of them intervenes'.

Another thing: My understanding of the bystander effect is that it's based on the pop culture understanding of the Kitty Genovese event (see top root comment for real story), which has an additional requirement: The bystanders can't see/talk to each other, but know the others are there in their apartments. The added anonymity is supposed to decrease obligation to help, decreasing the chance anyone will help.

Whenever I'm in a group like that, people start turning heads, looking at each other, asking if they smell/see it, what do you think it is, etc, and then leaving or reporting it somewhere.

Could it be that in 1968 you felt social pressure to keep cool and calm and unafraid? In that experiment, the presence of "confederates", people who cooperated with experimenters made everyone much more passive.

In 2019 you feel social pressure to act to look responsible and less pressure to look unafraid, so we think differently.

It's laudable to stop violence, but

"lainly tell them "give me a hand". That gets the ball rolling."

is pretty tough. People have lots of reasons to not get involved in physical altercations and plenty of them are valid, so you're putting a pretty big burden on them.

I think the most amazing/hilarious example I've seen of one person starting something by making the first move is this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk

:)

I think confusion is a big part of it. You often don't see the start of an incident, you're lost in your own business before your attention is drawn to something that might be nearly over before you even look at it. Who are these people? Is someone just messing around or is this real? Do they know each other? It takes us a long time generally to figure out how to respond to the truly unexpected.

> several cases of guys beating on their wives in public, two drunken attempted robberies, a variety of (literal) gay bashing, random subway violence, and oodles of shit I can't recall. The latest was two weeks ago: a hit and run with a teen victim with a very nasty headwound.

Wow, I had no idea Belgium was so violent!

Even people whose job it is to help will sit and watch stuff happen - I stopped an RNLI boat from floating away on an incoming tide, a lifeguard sat in their van and watched. One other person did come over to see if I needed help.

I think in that situation the two boat riders who had temporarily abandoned the boat - and who arrived back 5mins later - were viewed by this lifeguard as 'responsible' and they didn't want to step on their toes. But that boat, which they were using for an active search at the time, would have floated off.

What was most crazy to me was that they didn't thank me, they just sat in their van still.

When I was growing up in a medium sized town in Africa. The community was particularly active when it came to apprehending criminals be it a thief or someone who had just assaulted a woman. The young men of the town would chase down the criminal. They always got caught because everyone would participate. The alleged criminal would then be frog marched to the nearest policeman. Look perhaps one or two members of the public would throw in a punch or a kick at the thief but mostly they just held him. The last thing you wanted was to be charged for assaulting a criminal. Anyway other vigilante communities were not as gentle as in my town and alleged thieves got seriously hurt and couple even died from mob justice. So there was a big drive to stamp out the public apprehending criminals. This introduced some uncertainty and sometimes people don't act. In short we are making the right laws and making people aware of them. But sometimes the effect is that we are left uncertain hence we don't act.

  the article and the study
  are totally contrary to
  my experience

The article's definition of bystander intervention includes 'drunks held back from fighting by their buddies', assisting after the fight is over, and things like that.

And they only looked at conflict between people in city centres - so suicide attempts, cardiac arrests, falls, and hit-and-runs would all be excluded.

The article's findings sound plausible to me, given the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Societal norms are constantly evolving; what is normal today might have been unthinkable in the past when these studies were conducted.

Even with flawed studies aside, the word science is used very liberally to describe these fields. Even psychology’s most robust and well tested theories can’t come anywhere close to making accurate predictions.

Social psychology is very hard. Making correct experiments is hard, costly, often unethical and highly culture-dependent.

You can only get so far with questionnaire handled to middle-class/high-class university students...

One result that disagrees with other results does not "debunk" anything. It merely changes our confidence in the hypothesis.

It's not even clear that this result contradicts that social psych result.

To be frank, this study likely did not debunk anything.

Even 30 years ago, psychologists had outlined the criteria by which the bystander effect does not occur. A well known criterion (seen in many comments on HN) is to direct your plea for help to a single individual amongst the bystanders ("You! Call 911!" as opposed to "Someone call 911!"). Another aspect that's been known for over 30 years is that if someone in the crowd feels (s)he is an outsider, that person is a lot more likely to intervene.

Did they account for these in the study? How will they determine if a particular person thought of himself as an outsider? If they did not account for these, then the article is attacking a strawman.

Surveillance cameras do not correlate with "not in danger". It's not like people are watching these things in real time and jumping to action when they see something. After all, if that were the case, then there'd be no reason for bystanders to even get involved in these incidents at all.

Could possibly have the opposite effect?

I believe the study showed that the probability of any individual getting involved increases if there is no-one else present. i.e. they are the only one who can help.

Surveillance cameras might make people feel someone else will take responsibility.

Fear of legal retaliation and the Bystander Effect are two different things through. The bystander effect is supposedly a psychological phenomena where if you're in a crowd you feel less personal responsibility. If people's thinking is short-circuited by legal considerations, you can't study the natural psychological phenomena.

That's not the bystander effect though. In China, they're afraid of legal repercussions. In the bystander effect, it's diffusion of responsibility. Same effect but different causes.

Would be interesting to see if it went up linearly or some other function of the number of ppl.

Also, what do they define as a 'bystander'? If it's ppl with pre-existing relationships (which would not be clear from CC footage) it doesn't particularly go against the bystander effect.

Or simply that in this case, the bystander effect didn’t occur.

It’s also why today when something goes wrong, people are told to look directly at specific people and say “call the cops”/ “hold their head” and so on,

I think both could be true. Consider T to be the likelihood an individual will intervene, N the number of individuals, and P the probability of an intervention.

N, T = 1, 0.5 then P = 0.5

N, T = 10, 0.2 then P = (1-.8^10) = 0.9

Basically, the likelihood of an average individual to intervene may decline as there are more people, but the likelihood that at least one individual does intervene increases as crowd size does.

You could also argue the opposite: That because the bystander effect is well-known now, surely that means other people in the crowd will be more willing to act, and therefore you don't have to.

> This article incorrectly claims that the bystander effect is when a group of people are less likely to help than an individual

You are right. On the other hand, it may well be the correct popular definition of 'bystander effect'. Pop-sci (and pop-psych in particular) terms have a habit of being subtly redefined in the process of research→book→podcast→watercooler.

Um, what? The article doesn’t do this at all. This is straight from the 2nd paragraph:

“The “bystander effect” holds that the reason people don’t intervene is because we look to one another. The presence of many bystanders diffuses our own sense of personal responsibility, leading people to essentially do nothing and wait for someone else to jump in”

It’s clearly talking about individual behaviour in the presence of a crowd. You basically restated this exact point, then claimed the article didn’t make it!

The claim is that when there are several people standing around and some emergency arises, everyone will just assume someone else is going to help, and no one will end up helping.

And yet this study took place in a capital city, a major urban centre and a country tow, but found no significant difference in the results between them. That's despite big differences in the local crime and violence rates (I expect Cape Town being the outlier).

Hmm, searching around for the type of statistics you are talking about, I get articles to a couple of anecdotal stories that are frequently repeated on sites like Jihad Watch, Voice of Europe, RT, etc.

Unless you can provide some actual statistics, I would dismiss this as unfounded far-right propaganda.

Speaking for London, although many feel safe in the city. Most people (including me) aren’t stupid enough to get involved in a violent altercation if you happen to stumble across one.

It’d be foolish to get between 2 gangs fighting.

Alternatively if someone just collapsed on the street during rush hour, many will come over to help.

> really violent crime is happening as now in Western European cities, London, Berlin, etc.

Can you elaborate? Judging from statistics these both seem like reasonably safe large cities.

I wouldn’t recommend getting personally involved if two criminal gangs are in the middle of a knife fight or something. Getting the hell away and then calling the police from a safe distance seems like a better idea.

It's a different thing really. The old theory is not bystander doesn't intervene because it's dangerous but that they thought otter people would help.

In the UK when it's dangerous the police protect themselves as a matter of priority often retreating. This led to one situation of the knife terrorist attack on London bridge where the public did intervene and risk their own lives when the police stayed back. However it's not the case all the time with groups of people and the bystander effect and that example actually disproves the bystander effect too!

I am curious: do you consider yourself to be on the left or right end of the political spectrum?

I ask because even if your message is not explicitly political, it indicates to me that you might be leaning to the right and I am curious about what the root-differences between that and someone like myself who is probably more left leaning really are. Clearly it's related to fear, but I have fears too (like climate change or fascism). It's really interesting to me why people fear one but not the other, in each direction. It feels like there is some sort of fundamental psychological principle that decides whether you are one or the other.