alainlatour.com

As a U of T Psychology minor, I’ve long thought Psychology 101 should be a manda­tory course, not just in uni­ver­sity, but begin­ning in high school. The recent death of Judy Tak Fong Lam Chiu, a 66-year-old demen­tia patient who froze to death after wan­der­ing out­side at 2 a.m., only reaf­firms my belief.

The pub­lic seems to think neigh­bors who ignored Ms. Chiu’s cries for help are very bad peo­ple. In an effort to explain why no one called the police, a reader spec­u­lated in the Globe and Mail web­site that per­haps Ms. Chiu had screamed obscen­i­ties, which might have scared poten­tial res­cuers away. Most of the other com­menters were harsher.

“Those who heard her cries and screams and elected to ignore them must be charged,” wrote Sorethroat.

“I’d like to think that in Canada we are still a car­ing soci­ety,” wrote JohnnyCoast, not sound­ing hopeful.

This is an under­stand­able reac­tion. Unable to com­pre­hend why some­one would ignore a fel­low human being’s cries for help, most us read­ily assume that the peo­ple who just stood by are bad people.

But what if that isn’t the case? What if we too would have just stood by?

Nonsense, you say. I’m a good per­son. I would’ve done something.

The Bystander Effect

This is where a knowl­edge of Psychology comes in handy. The rea­son why peo­ple some­times ignore vic­tims’ pleas is a very sim­ple one. It’s known as the bystander effect, and it’s been amply doc­u­mented. Wikipedia offers a fairly good def­i­n­i­tion.

I will sum­ma­rize it as fol­lows: the greater the num­ber of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help.

Why? There a num­ber of reasons—none of them sin­is­ter or even depressing.

One, and the most impor­tant in my opin­ion, is that every­body assumes some­body else will act, there­fore feel­ing less respon­si­ble. Psychologists refer to this as “dif­fu­sion of responsibility.”

A sec­ond rea­son why bystanders may not do any­thing is related to the prin­ci­ple of social influ­ence, whereby every­one mon­i­tors the reac­tions of other bystanders for cues on how to act. Since they are not doing any­thing, nei­ther will we.

There are even more rea­sons, includ­ing fear of los­ing face or of offer­ing unwanted assis­tance. And espe­cially in North America, as the immi­grant in me can­not resist point­ing out, the risk of legal lia­bil­ity can­not be forgotten.

These expla­na­tions my seem far­fetched or unlikely, but the fact remains that the bystander effect has been demon­strated in lab con­di­tions in many occa­sions. When the sub­ject of the exper­i­ment is alone and sees some­one (an accom­plice, or in Psychology-speak, a con­fed­er­ate of the exper­i­menter) in what the sub­ject per­ceives to be a dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion, they usu­ally act appro­pri­ately. These dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions have ranged from epilep­tic seizures (fake, of course) to a per­son falling.

But when the sub­ject is sur­rounded by other peo­ple, it often takes them a long time to act, if they do act at all. In fact, “these exper­i­ments vir­tu­ally always find that the pres­ence of oth­ers inhibits help­ing, often by a large margin.”

The point here is not to blame or exon­er­ate any­one, but to make us aware of one sim­ple fact: if some­thing bad hap­pens to some­one in from of our eyes, we should know that no one but us is likely to come to the res­cue. This isn’t because oth­ers are bad peo­ple. It’s because they are not aware of the bystander effect.

This knowl­edge allowed me once to come to the aid of an old lady who’d slipped and fallen back­wards in a gro­cery store whose tile floor was cov­ered by sleet. The old lady lay there, moan­ing, and not one per­son came to her aid. I did, though. I knelt beside her, com­forted her, asked where it hurt, called the ambu­lance from my cell phone, held her hand until the para­medics arrived, and even phoned her son so he would come with her to the hospital.

I know I’m not nec­es­sar­ily a bet­ter per­son than the other patrons. I know they too would’ve acted, had they been con­scious of the bystander effect.

Now you are, too.