Bystander Effect Examples

An obese woman gets heckled. A man openly abuses his girlfriend. A restaurant owner mistreats a person without a home.

You may have seen the ABC show, What Would You Do, which recreates these scenarios inspired by real life to test the reactions of passerbys who don’t know they’re being filmed. The actions–or inactions–that they catch on camera quickly open up a strange window into the human condition.

Consider, for example, an 8 minute clip from an episode where a group of teenage boys assault a Latino man, targeting him with racial remarks as they punch him.

What is most striking perhaps is the wide range of passerby reactions, as well as the sometimes unexpected heroes that emerge. Take the group of five men who pause to watch the action, at 5:13, but do next to nothing. They’re a prime example of what is known as the bystander effect.

Define Bystander Effect.

So what is Bystander Effect? 

The definition of bystander effect is “a phenomena in which people do not intervene to help another human in crisis.”

But Bystander Effect Experiments Sometimes Also Turn Up Heroes.

In the same experiment described above, for example, there is a tiny woman who prompts the good kind of chills when she stops her car, gets out of her vehicle, and confronts the group of attackers by herself at 5:43.

After the scene has played itself out, producers interviewed those who walked by to find out why they responded the way they did. The group of five men walked away embarrassed, refusing to have their faces shown on camera. The woman, on the other hand, explained she could relate to the man being harmed.

This question around why humans sometimes relate (and why we sometimes FAIL to relate) of course cycles beneath the bystander effect examples in my two previous blog posts as well. Like the post about Natalie Wood (an elderly woman whose death went unnoticed by her community) and the post about real-life onlookers who failed to intervene in crucial situations, this camera footage jars us into thinking about social connectedness. And–I hope–it also lends insight into the way we relate to people in every day life as well.

For example, I would suggest perhaps the question, “Why didn’t we do more?” scales up or down. The same emotions, motives, and impulses that are at work in these severe, out-of-the-ordinary events may often be the same forces that direct smaller, everyday interactions between people (whether you stop to talk or just nod at the neighbor at the mail box), just as they are often the same forces that manifest in larger-scale international conflicts.

Bystander Effect Articles

For instance, just as the woman assaulted while onlookers filmed asked, “Why did no one come to my rescue?”, The Atlantic article, “Bystanders to Genocide,” asked the same question about the United States’ response to mass murders in Rwanda: Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings?

According to the Atlantic, much like the onlookers in these previous posts,

“The U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.”

And like the bystanders in the What Would You Do episode, U.S. officials were similarly asked to account for their actions after-the-fact.

In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the “Clinton apology,” which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: “We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred” in Rwanda.

Bystander effect psychology impacts our society at every level.

While startling headlines or global conflicts tend to grab our attention more than data about the loss of civility in American culture, I think it’s an important starting point to acknowledge that the convictions which direct how we connect to humans in everyday life are likely the same ones that play out in extreme scenarios and global conflict.

That every day–all of us, at every level–choose to be attentive…or to not be attentive.

We notice and choose to relate to the people whose lives intersect ours…or we don’t.

We protect humanity or we turn our heads and let inhumanity slide by unchallenged.

[Tweet “We protect humanity or we turn our heads and let inhumanity slide by unchallenged.”]

Whether we live attached to or detached from the people around us has massive implications for us personally, as communities, and as people who share a planet together. I would also suggest it has critical implications for how we understand and live out our faith.

If you’re reading along and can relate, I would love to hear your comments. Speak into the conversation anytime. I enjoy hearing your experiences and ideas, as well as your pushback.

Photo source: Observers