When 100 people lift a bus

One thing, though, if you are a leader type, and need more hands involved. Instead of making a general request to the crowd, point at a particular person, and say something like "You in the green shirt and the cell phone -- can you call 911?" "You in the yellow jacket, can you help direct traffic?", etc.

I didnt have time to get my camera out to photograph them as they had cut the cable, so without really thinking I just gave chase (i was on my bike). My non-thinking caught up with me pretty quickly when i was next to him and thought "What now?" so I just pushed him off the bike, he fell, got up and ran off leaving the stolen bike behind.

Amazingly someone who saw this incident then asked if I was stealing the bike.

But yeah the bystander effect seems to be a 'not my business' type of stance that people take, and it makes them worse people and their community a worse community because of it. I sometimes wonder if these people ever think "why is no one helping me" when something happens to them? If they do I bet they never draw the parallel to their own inaction on previous occassions.

It's tricky, I don't think people are usually concerned with being late, I think it's more about efficiency. You can't have everybody who sees someone in trouble help, because the situation will be overwhelmed and it's possible more damage can actually be done that way. Other times people simply just don't know what to do, for example, like how to give CPR, and they just assume that they therefore cannot help.

So we need something like a distributed consensus algorithm to figure out who should be the people to respond. I have heard the best thing a person with no medical training can do is actually to delegate tasks to other people. Saying things like "You, call 911" and "Is anybody a doctor?" etc.

Maybe the bystander effect is a form of paralysis. Doubt, lack of knowledge, fear for one's own safety, it's just easier to do nothing - all those thoughts are flooding the system.

My candidate: social awkwardness and feelings of inadequacy. "Is this real? If I'm the only one making a fuss I'll look like an idiot. Oh please let someone else take the first step so it won't be everyone looking to me for direction. I don't know what I'm doing. Help, how do I CPR?" Often combined with a fear for personal safety. "Will the car explode? Will the bus fall on me? Is the drunk guy going to stab me if I touch him? Or infectious? Or about to vomit when I do rescue breaths? Will I go to jail if I get it wrong and he dies? Isn't it better to not involve myself?"

i stopped to help him, no-one else seemed to be. no doubt in large part in aversion to having to deal with a rough looking drunk.

shortly after i'd tried to rouse him and started to call an ambulance, a girl came over to see if everything was ok. she told me that she'd previously walked past him and wanted to do something, but had been scared to in case he was unpredictable, because of the state that he was in (more than likely booze+drugs). to give you some sense, i'm 6' 2 and built like a bus. i dont think twice about intervening in situations, because i never feel unsafe doing so. unfortunately, not everyone feels as safe as i do, and that's not to say that something bad couldn't still happen to me.

i've seen enough situations like this, drunks lying prone in a state, couples having arguments that devolve into fisticuffs, horrible slow motion accidents, to think that these situations fall roughly into

im too scared to help

i dont want the trouble (someone else will sort it out)

i literally dont give a damn

i think on the whole, most do give a damn, but i think they'd be more likely to stop to help with an accident then they would a homeless person in a bad state.

one time i kind of regret trying to help someone was an elderly man who i saw in distress trying to get home. he was walking along, but the further he got down the road, the harder it became for him to walk, he was so obviously having trouble i went up to him and asked him if he needed help. i ended up chaperoning him all the way to his house, which was around the corner, up a hill. of course he had to go and collapse half way up the hill from exhaustion. at this point i thought, fuck this, and called an ambulance.

thankfully the old man finally managed to get home eventually. it turned out he'd sneaked out for an amble to the shops, according to his carer, even though he couldn't really walk well enough to do so. him collapsing on me as i manhandled him to the ground is one of the scariest things that's ever happened to me. i thought that by helping him i'd inadvertently participated in giving the guy a heat attack or something.

It's not logic, it's irrational. It's an example of the typical human brain process being less than logical. There are all kinds of reasons people don't stop. They don't know what to do. They feel inadequate or unqualified to help. They don't want the social pressure of being the only one to be doing something different.

There is a famous experiment involving a bunch of people in a room who are all secret participants except for one person. They all ignore the bleating smoke alarm, and even the smoke when it comes into the room, and the study subject will do so as well. There are lots of other experiments about this too, with some fascinating videos on YouTube.

But the central answer to your question is that it's behavior that is irrational and not founded on logic.

I sometimes read /r/letsnotmeet and a lot of stories end with "...and no one bothered to help me" when a woman was being harassed. The top comment is almost always, "Did you ask for help? Scream? Signal anyone? Do anything?" The answer is always "no."

The top commenter often reminds the author that what seems terribly important to you may look like an everyday conversation to others. The harasser looks like he could have been the girl's boyfriend to someone on the outside. The stories that do involve pleas for help all seem to end with someone helping out. People want to intervene when they realize there's an opportunity to do so.

There's something perverse about assuming we're all cold calculating machines who don't care about others. It seems like the truly shitty people want to believe this to make themselves feel better about their own apathy. Its classic projection.

Its an emotional response, not a logical one, so trying to explain the logic behind it is probably pointless. OTOH, if you assume pure rationality, its may well be usually justifiable: even though most people aren't actually explicitly weighing factors, where people don't intervene its quite conceivable that the expected marginal increase in experienced utility from intervening generally exceeds the expected marginal cost.

Also, there is a known psychological effect of having many people around a victim that all expect others to do something. It becomes easier for people to ignore victims to the point where I've heard of people in very traumatic situations being completely neglected because there is just such a mass of people in the vicinity that no one helps.

People should all help each other out, but there are both good and bad reasons that explain why people don't always jump in to help.

And if you're in the know about this—if you're the one who decided the punishment was necessary—then you'll just stand there and not act.

But what if you're not?

For example, let's say you're a child hanging around with your parents, and you see a member of another tribe (who your tribe has some sort of blood feud against, which your parents are aware of but you're not) dangling off a ledge.

Well, it would be a very handy adaptation, to the advantage of your tribe's ability to negotiate its position relative to the other tribe, if you didn't help, even though the plain empathetic instinct is to help. It would be especially good if you would would wait to see if your parents decide to help, and only then suddenly feel the need to help.

This hypothesis would predict that the less people have the "Conscientiousness" personality trait—the one that makes them feel social reprobation more strongly—the less the bystander effect will affect them.

Perhaps they did and the medical doctor said it's was OK in this situation.

"Due to the risk of crush syndrome, current recommendation to lay first-aiders (in the UK) is to not release victims of crush injury who have been trapped for more than 15 minutes."

So crush syndrome is not relevant here. There's a reason why it isn't well known - because the naturally obvious thing to do is the right thing to do here (after first stopping the bus and calling an ambulance)

Faced with this situation, what would you have done?

What is more risky here is not the release of the vicitim - but the potential for a failed release. What if 100 people tried to lift the bus, but it turns out they wernt strong enough, resulting in the bus just pivoting on the spot. That pivoting might have crushed the injury further - leading to significant more damage. When we extricate patients - we always aim to do it in a controlled environment. Even when they are sick, slow and steady is often best.

One of the worse worse worse things bystanders often do is pull objects out of patients. i.e. if you are stabbed, and the knife is still in you - do not pull it out.

I think bystanders think they need to do "something" - but sometimes doing nothing (i.e. dont pull the knife out) is best.

>There are many kinds of injuries (not just puncture or spinal injuries) that get much worse if treated by someone with no medical experience.

So? Just leave the guy to die under the bus?

>The article said his leg was crushed but lifting the bus "looked like the most reasonable action to take".

The article is reporting second hand information from eyewitnesses. Basing your analysis on that is to put it bluntly - stupid.

>One of the possible consequences of a suddenly released crush injury is kidney failure caused by crush syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome

So what? You keep stating these as-if they are revelations. People already have a good understanding that injuries can have unanticipated complications.

>Like all of the people involved in this story, I'm not a medical expert,

How do you know that nobody there was a medical expert? They did not interview 100 people. Nor did they do a survey of all the people around the accident.

>However, I think it would be responsible journalism to ask a medical doctor whether the crowd did the right thing before hailing them as heroes and encouraging others to do the same.

The word hero was not in the article. In any case, they ARE heroes because they risked their own safety to help another human being.

wait for the ambulance and help then, if they need it.

There's a goal with those photographs. To make people aware and get them to help usually through donation. There is nothing to gain from a dozen people standing around videoing a man suffering under a bus in central London other than morbid curiosity. What will become of the videos those people made? What use do they have. If you can't help move on as you're probably in the way.

Kinda? Filming with no other reason, no other commentary, than to reduce it to a cheap jape online or some element of personal amusement....

At least for myself, it falls under the set of 'Why would you want a record of this?' Whereas presumably people aren't - at least not often - jacking off or have a jolly good time over pictures of kids covered in napalm, or whatever, in the newest military adventure.

There are, unquestionably, those who do enjoy war videos just for the sake of some momentary vicarious adrenaline drip granted them by the suffering portrayed. You know, the videos that pop up from time to time with rock music over the gun cams of helicopters and the like. But ... wouldn't you find it slightly worrying if you found someone watching one? Or if it was shown on the 10 o'clock news as an item of amusement?

It's that sort of thing, at least to me. The recording implies really bad taste.

Whether that's a cultural thing (I'm british too) or whether it's a more general thing I don't know.

Given the situation it kind of puts people standing out if people try to film it while everyone else is trying to help.

There have been a couple of cases in the last few months where people have tweeted pictures of people who've killed themselves by jumping in front of trains.

- http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/17/police-condem...

- http://www.herefordtimes.com/news/12928871.Fatality_on_the_l...

The concern is the deceased next-of-kin might find out via Twitter, which is considered inappropriate. It's also disrespectful.

I wonder if you would feel different if you were the one UNDER that bus?

Manual gear start on a slope in a large, heavy vehicle is probably not going to go well, forward or backwards, when half and inch or 1cm is at stake.