Has The World Gone To Hell?

This might be the commonplace reaction to the following story I read today:

A heroic homeless man, stabbed after saving a Queens woman from a knife-wielding attacker, lay dying in a pool of blood for more than an hour as nearly 25 people indifferently strolled past him, a shocking surveillance video obtained by The Post reveals.
…
In the wake of the bloodshed, a man came out of a nearby building and chillingly took a cellphone photo of the victim before leaving. And in several instances, pairs of people gawked at Tale-Yax without doing anything.

[Embedded video, won't show in emails or feed readers so click through to the blog to see it]

We tend to interpret such events as showing that the world is in decline. This is similar to the common misconception that violence is increasing: both are born out of an inherent human bias that tends to see things as always getting worse, reaching all-time new lows. This is obviously an incorrect bias, here we have no idea how common it was historically for people to ignore others as they die in public. Maybe things were worse then, or the same (both seem plausible).

The other plausible explanation is that things have probably been about the same because this is a feature of human behaviour. The bystander effect is when the presence of lots of people during an emergency results in a lower response to help. There are a few explanations: there’s the diffusion of responsibility, the desire not to stand out of the crowd where nobody’s helping and the like. In one study, subjects were asked to wait in a room that eventually started filling with smoke from the crack in the door. Subjects who were alone almost always went to get someone’s attention; those with a mole in the room who did nothing were much more likely to do nothing.

But then, the video hardly shows a crowd. Instead we see 25 people come in groups of 1 or 2. Maybe the reality of New York city is that people always consider themselves to be part of a crowd even if they’re on an empty street. When I’m walking on a street in Sydney late at night I tend to have a notion at the back of my head that someone else will be here very soon. Maybe this is multiplied 1000-fold in NY. In this case the diffusion of responsibility was a lot more tenuous but it might have still happened.

The other potential explanation is that people were simply going about their night, were in a hurry and therefore weren’t willing to stop. This is more plausible than it might seen, as shown from this study done on seminary students. The subjects were asked to preach a sermon in a building on the other side of the campus. Half were told they had plenty of time to get there, the other half were told they were late. On their way, each student encountered a participant who seemed to be having a heart attack. The main predictor for whether people helped or not was whether they were in a hurry — if they were virtually nobody stopped. The punchline is that they were all asked to preach a sermon on the Good Samaritan, so thinking about helping others in such a situation doesn’t seem to contribute.

But then some in the video weren’t in a hurry. Maybe the man who took the photo on his mobile phone was just a psychopath — they do form about 1% of the population. Here we have to think about culture as well though — it’s no coincidence that these passers-by all abandoned a homeless man who was also an immigrant. Methinks if he was wearing a suit things would have turned out differently.

So yes, it probably does say something terrible about people in general — though to consider it a sign of decline is I think ridiculous. But there is one reaction that I think is very damaging: “but I would have helped!” Umm, these 25 people were quite ordinary. People are sure they wouldn’t kill someone at the orders of a superior — but they do. The best take-home message is that your “natural” reaction (whatever that means) would probably be the same as those 25 people — and believing yourself to be quite similar to the other 25 you may then be more likely to save a life.