Passive bystanders

Leafing through Influence convinced me that it’s a book I want to read; besides the stuff about “terrible twos” my attention was also caught by a passage about how bystanders react to acts of violence or other crimes. Every now and then you read about some incident where people witnessing it haven’t intervened or called the police. According to the book, this has to do with group behavior: everybody in the crowd are unsure about what to do and thus wait to see how others react.

Robert Cialdini also writes about what you should do if you should find yourself as the victim with nobody helping you; apparently, it might not be enough to shout for help, you must identify an individual in the crowd and address him or her directly. He tells us about a car accident he was in, where cars just passed by, with the drivers and passengers just looking at him and the other wounded people, until he asked specific people for help.

This is something I can relate to, actually; I went too fast on my bike and fell off in a curve and wounded my knees and my right elbow. Three people passed on their bicycles, looking at me, with torn and bloody clothes, until I asked two ladies (also on bicycles) to direct me to the nearest hospital.

A few weeks ago, there was a debate show on Swedish television about this. They staged assaults on a very busy pedestrian-only street in Stockholm and apparently no-one intervened. I only saw the trailer and not the actual show, so I don’t know what they said; but the trailer gave the usual impression of “What has happened to our society?” – which, according to Cialdini’s book, has nothing to do with it.