The Bystander Effect

The Israeli Motorcyclist
I read a news story Tuesday about how a motorcyclist involved in an accident laid in the middle of a busy intersection for 2 minutes before someone stopped to help him. His motorcycle was just a few meters away and yet over 30 cars and trucks slowed down and carefully drove around the man without stopping. The man was later pronounced dead at the scene.

This seems to be a classic example of one of the more interesting phenomena studied by social psychologists – the “bystander effect.”

Suppose there is a person in trouble and in need of assistance. Under which circumstances would that person be most likely to actually receive assistance? When there is just one person around or when there is a group of people? You may be surprised to learn that groups of bystanders are less likely than individuals to help a person in trouble.

Kitty Genovese
In 1964, Kitty Genovese (pictured above) was attacked, raped, and stabbed to death by a man just outside her apartment complex in New York. There was quite a commotion as she screamed for help. For example, it was later reported that others heard her call out, “Oh my God! He stabbed me! Please help me!!” In fact, the screams apparently scared the attacker and he hid in an entryway twice, only to return to finish his assault – which lasted over 30 minutes. Perhaps most horrifying is the fact that 38 different witnesses heard or saw something of the attack from their own apartment windows, and yet none of them came to her rescue or called the police.

Since this event, social psychologists like John Darley and Bibb Latane have been able to consistently demonstrate the bystander effect in a wide range of experiments.

There seem to be several factors involved in the bystander effect. Among them….
(1) There seems to be a “diffusion of responsibility” that occurs in groups. If you are the only person who knows someone else needs assistance, then you are likely to feel 100% responsible for giving them assistance. But if you are among 9 other people who all know the person needs assistance, you may only feel 10% responsible.
(2) There is a greater risk of embarrassment in groups. When others are around, people engage in a particular inner dialogue. “Surely someone else has already offered help. And someone else must know how to help in this situation better than I do. What if it isn’t really that serious after all? Somebody else knows what’s going on and knows what to do more than I do.” Of course, when everyone in a group has the same inner dialogue, the person may not get any help at all.
(3) People read the “social cues” of those around them. Each person in the group tries to remain outwardly calm and detached while they read the facial expressions, body language, and actions of the others around them. After all, no one wants to overreact. But since each person is doing the same thing, the social cues of the group reinforce the notion that no help is needed.

Our Friends, Neighbors, or Co-Workers
The thought occurred to me that maybe a variation of the bystander effect is at work hindering Christians from sharing our faith with others like we should.
(1) Perhaps we don’t boldly share our faith because we don’t feel individually responsible for the other person. I barely know the names of some of my neighbors, let alone know anything about their spiritual life. I’m ashamed to admit the “percentage” of responsibility I feel for them is very low.
(2) Perhaps we don’t boldly share our faith because we fear failure or embarrassment. After all, there are other Christians who know how to share their faith better than we do. Maybe we won’t have the answers to their questions. Maybe we’ll just make things worse. Maybe the person is already a Christian and there’s no real spiritual emergency after all.
(3) Perhaps we don’t boldly share our faith because we are reading the wrong social cues. If I don’t hear my friends talking about sharing their faith, if I don’t see them doing it, if it doesn’t come up in our conversations or our prayers together, if the topic is absent in my relationships with other believers, then I begin to act and think as if it isn’t very important.

It’s been a rambling post today – my apologies. Your thoughts or observations on the social dynamics of evangelism?