The Bystander Effect

Enabling the hate by not stepping in.

The field of psychology has identified a phenomenon called “the Bystander Effect.” According to Wikipedia, it is defined as follows:

The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present. The greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. Several factors contribute to the bystander effect, including ambiguity, cohesiveness and diffusion of responsibility. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

The news and social media have given us countless examples of this phenomenon recently. The two gentlemen who were arrested at Starbucks for sitting while being black, the two students who were pulled from a University of Colorado campus tour for being Native American, and there was an experiment conducted at a fast food restaurant that showed customers were much more likely to speak up when their burgers were bullied than when they witnessed a young boy being bullied, and so on. The media coverage seems to be focused on the victims and the ones who victimized them, but less attention is paid to all the other people involved.

In the examples I mentioned, there were some people who fought the urge to wait around and see what happened. There were folks who spoke up and got involved. But not as many as you would hope there would be.

So, what would you do? If you saw an injustice playing out in front of you, would you get involved? Would you speak up?

We’d all like to think that we would. We would all like to believe that, faced with a wrong, we’d take steps to correct it.

But the evidence points to the contrary.

History is filled with examples of people standing by and letting terrible things happen, because they believe that someone else would take care of it. We turn to authorities, to higher powers, to someone else to make it right.

The Wikipedia definition notes three factors involved in the bystander effect: Ambiguity, Cohesiveness, and Diffusion of Responsibility.

• Ambiguity comes into play when people tell themselves they don’t know the whole story, and therefore if they act they could actually be fighting on the wrong side of the issue or making the situation worse in some other way.
• Cohesiveness refers to the influence of whether a person believes other bystanders will back him or her up if he acts based on how connected the people are to each other. In other words, if the bystanders are all strangers, it is less likely that anyone will act.
• Diffusion of Responsibility refers to the fact that the more people there are witnessing the event, the more likely we are to assume someone else will take care of it.

This phenomenon has happened across time and cultures, so one could say that it is a fundamental part of who we are as human beings. It is ingrained into us based on psychology, sociology, and the very nature of human interactions. So we really can’t be blamed, right?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the disconnect between how we think we should be and how we actually are. I advocate for the acceptance of human limitations and the acknowledgement that we are less perfect and less capable than we think we should be. But this is not the same thing as promoting the notion that we should not try to be better.

Along with the negative stories in the press and on social media, I have also seen stories that give me hope. I read one last night about a man who spoke up in a barbershop where he was the only white person to disagree with a woman who was defending Kanye West’s comments about slavery. I remember with hope the story of the black woman who threw herself on the white supremacist who was being beaten by black protesters, along with many other stories showing that we can be better.

Because in this instance, I say we should be better. Not perfect, but better.

I used to spend a lot of time on Medium talking about Trump, because I, like many others, just cannot get over the fact that this guy is getting away with all the nonsense he is getting away with. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that Trump himself isn’t really the problem.

Initially I misunderstood the cohesiveness factor to refer how much the individual identifies with the victim. Reading a bit more I was reminded (from my psychology classes over 20 years ago) that it has more to do with how much we identify with the other bystanders. And I think this is where a lot of the problem lies.

Before the 2016 election, at least for me, whether someone was a Democrat or Republican didn’t factor nearly as strongly in how I perceived them as it does today. It used to be a lot easier for me to assume that all of us were essentially good people and wanted the same basic things. Now, it is harder for me to see things that way. The “us versus them” mentality is something I have to struggle against, because I see this as the Achilles heel of the die-hard Trump supporters, and I know that giving into this kind of thinking makes me as bad as those I am so very frustrated with. It is a circular argument that is very hard to get out of.

And I think it is something that a lot of people are struggling with. We can no longer assume that everyone wants “the right thing” because the definition of “the right thing” is apparently not something that we can all agree on. The polarization of the American people means that we no longer assume that strangers will have our backs if we stand up to do what is right, because they may not see it as what is right.

The examples I cited earlier share the theme of persons in apparent power victimizing minorities. White versus black, white versus Native American, and bigger kids in numbers versus one smaller kid. In the past I would have assumed that everyone would see these situations and agree that they were wrong.

And yet, no one, or almost no one, stood up to make it better.

When I studied the bystander effect years ago, I thought the central factor was fear. Fear that getting involved would lead to harm to one’s self. But now I wonder about the other factor, which is agreement with the victimizer.

If I discriminate in my heart, whether I have the sense to hide these feelings in public or not, then I am not going to stand up to stop an injustice that I myself might perpretrate. If I am afraid of black people, then I am certainly not going to speak up and protest if I see black people being discriminated against.

This is another circular argument, because discrimination comes from fear. We discriminate against those that are different than us because we beileve they will harm us. Either through violence, by taking something we feel we are entitled to, or even by making us look bad. We convince ourselves that we are superior, and that they are inferior, because deep down we are afraid the opposite is true. We fear that these “others” will somehow gain power over us and we will suffer.

I am extremely white. As in “raised in a small town with almost no black people and completely oblivious to black culture until my teens” white. My first experience with being a minority came when I was in college, and I took a temporary part-time job with the IRS sorting tax forms. Almost all of my coworkers and superiors were black.

And I was afraid.

Afraid to speak up or be noticed because I might be made fun of or even physically harmed by these inner-city kids who were more worldly-wise and powerful than I was, and who might have a grudge against me simply because I was white.

They didn’t harm me in any physical or psychological way, as you might have expected, and over time I might not have made close friends there, but I did realize my non-white coworkers were just kids making some extra bucks just like I was, and any differences I perceived (language, clothing, references, etc.) were on the surface and not substantial. My supervisor, a young black woman, is to this day one of my favorite bosses because she was down to earth and kind, and she made me feel like I belonged (through no real effort on her part) simply by treating me like everyone else working there.

I still remember watching Maya Angelou on Sesame Street reciting the poem “Human Family,” which ends with the line “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” I don’t recall this line as a string of text when I think about it. Instead I hear Maya’s rich, warm voice as she said it, and picture her smiling, comforting face. This quote is one I hear in my head more often than most of the other nuggets of wisdom I have heard or read over the years because of its pure and simple truth.

Pure and simple, maybe, but one that we struggle to remember in the heat of all of the divisiveness around us today. America, the supposed melding pot of the world, seems to have more trouble these days with accepting differences than a lot of the other nations. The vitriol against immigrants and native peoples who are not white or who speak another language or have cultures and customs that are out of what some think of as mainstream American culture are attacked and victimized because they represent a threat to that culture.

Trump successfully tapped into the cohesiveness factor by making people feel better about their discrimination and by playing on their fear. He told people that it was okay to think that they were better than these people who were not like them and gave them safety in numbers. He stirred up that sense of injustice in people who felt they had not gotten their fair shake, and gave them groups to blame.

In the first two examples I mentioned earlier, I talked about the bystanders who witnessed injustices and who failed to act. But remember that it was bystanders who saw these non-white people as a perceived threat, then felt empowered to speak up and address their fears. They were subsequently rewarded when someone in a position of power (police in one instance, campus security in the other) justified their fears by removing the victims.

The patterns set by Trump and everyone who supports him gave more credence to these individuals’ prejudices and the fears they spring from.

We as humans like safety in numbers. Many of us who would have said they were somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum in the past have willingly jumped towards the extremes, because we felt we had others backing us and we could take comfort in the shared frustration and anger. The “us versus them” thinking has magnified exponentially. This has happened in the past in many countries over many different issues.

Because we, as humans, continue to be more alike, my friends, than we are unalike. We all have a sense of self-preservation that is constantly struggling against our urge towards altrusim. We wonder how much we should be doing for our fellow man in contrast to how much we should be doing to protect ourselves.

The political debate has perhaps reassured some people that it is okay to focus on self-preservation, because altruism with the wrong people will only lead to harm.

For me, I would like to always err on the side of altruism, and I hope that the next time I am a bystander, I will have the courage to act.