We like to think of ourselves as good, moral people, capable of empathy and compassion. Prosocial behavior benefits our relatives, friends, and groups; materially benefits victims; and psychologically benefits ourselves. At this point, we might expect that being helpful will always be the norm. But we can probably think of times when we passed by a panhandler without giving him money, closed the door on a solicitor seeking donations for a local charity, or made excuses to a friend looking for a ride to the airport. The fact of the matter is that we don’t always give or receive help. The flip side of looking at variables that elevate our helpful tendencies is to consider those that inhibit helping.

We began this chapter with dramatic examples of helping. But during the Nazi era, for every rescuer who helped Jews avoid persecution, there were many, many more people who did nothing—or worse. Of course the risks of helping in such a context were high. We also considered many examples of more mundane helping in which the potential costs of helping were fairly low. Giving our spare change to a charity or helping someone pick up dropped papers takes little effort on our part, and no great harm is done if we casually walk on by. In these situations, not giving help typically goes unnoticed. But then there are high-need situations in which helping would be low cost but still doesn’t happen. Every month or so in countries around the world, you can find a story in the news of a horrible tragedy that could have been prevented by a mere phone call, such as the story we noted earlier of a girl who was gang-raped outside of a homecoming dance while other students stood by and watched. When such events happen, we read about them with horror but also confusion. How could someone stand by and do nothing to help? Is this evidence of a callous generation of youth, desensitized to harm by hours spent playing violent video games or watching slasher movies? Probably not. The sad truth is that such events have happened for generations. In fact, social psychologists first took an interest in studying the complexities of prosocial behavior after just such an incident made headlines in 1964.

In the early morning hours on a cold day in March, Kitty Genovese returned home after work. As she walked toward her apartment building in Queens, New York, she was attacked from behind and stabbed in the back. The perpetrator continued to assault and stab her in a brutal attack that lasted over 30 minutes. During this time, Genovese cried for help, screamed that she had been stabbed, and tried to fight off her assailant. A New York newspaper reported that 38 people had witnessed the attack from their apartment windows and yet no one called the police until after the attack had ended. Unfortunately, by then it was too late. Genovese died on the way to the hospital (Gansberg, 1964).

At the time, people took this horrific episode as evidence of the moral disintegration of New Yorkers—not just the murderer but also the witnesses who did not act. Although there has been some recent debate about whether the newspaper report exaggerated the number of witnesses (Manning et al., 2007), there were clearly more than enough witnesses to expect someone to have picked up the phone and called the police, yet no one did. This event inspired John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) to engage in a groundbreaking set of studies documenting the bystander effect. The bystander effect generally refers to a phenomenon in which a person who witnesses another in need is less likely to help when there are other bystanders present to witness the event. On the surface, this idea seems ironic. Shouldn’t the presence of other witnesses encourage individuals to help? The interesting fact of psychology is that sometimes the presence of others can make an individual inactive, although as we will see, this can happen for a few different reasons.

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To see how this works, put yourself in the shoes of one of Darley and Latané’s (1968) participants. You think you are going to be having a conversation over an intercom system about the challenges of being at college. You learn that it will just be you and another student, or that you will be part of a group of either three or six. To protect everyone’s privacy, you are each in your own room, only able to hear the others over the intercom. As the discussion gets under way, one of the other participants discloses his history of having seizures and talks about how disruptive and stressful it can be. You are also asked to share something about your experience, as are the other participants if you are part of a group. After another round of sharing, the student who had complained of seizures seems to be having one. The transcript of what people actually heard included:

I-er-um-I think I-I need-er-if-if could-er-er-somebody er-er-er-er-er-er-er give me a little-er-give me a little help here because-er-I-er-I’m-er-er—having a-a-a real problem-er-right now and I-er-if somebody could help me out it would-it would-er-er s-s-sure be-sure be good . . . (p. 379).

Clearly, this person is having a hard time and is explicitly asking for help. If you were like the students who participated in this study over 40 years ago, you probably would get up to find the experimenter if you thought you had been having a private conversation with this person. Every single participant in that condition got up to help, and 85% of them did so within a minute and before the victim’s apparent seizure had ended. When participants believed instead that four other people were listening, only 31% tried to help by the time the seizure had ended.

In another study (Latané & Darley, 1968), participants completed questionnaires in a waiting room, either alone or with two others who were sometimes confederates of the study or sometimes other naive participants. As they dutifully answered surveys, smoke began to stream into the room through a wall vent. In the group condition, the two confederates both looked up at the smoke briefly and then went back to their questionnaires. If participants were alone, 75% of them got up and alerted the experimenters to the smoke. But this dropped to less than 40% when three naive participants were in the room, and only 10% if the participant sat alongside confederates who remained inactive.

A recent meta-analysis of 50 years of research shows the bystander effect to be a reliable phenomenon (Fischer et al., 2011). A tendency toward inaction even increases as the number of bystanders gets larger. Interestingly, despite the many documented cases of inaction in high danger situations, the bystander effect is generally more likely to occur when the situation seems less dangerous. Although people clearly fail to act sometimes when the victim is in great peril, they are even less likely to act if the need for help is minor and others might be expected to intervene (Fischer et al., 2011). The bystander effect also is more likely to occur among strangers than among friends. But even if we are with strangers, the mere expectation that later we will be working alongside these people increases our tendency to provide help to someone, even in the presence of other observers (Gottlieb & Carver, 1980). Feeling a sense of connection to those around you can turn a mere collection of inactive individuals into a powerful collective. Even learning about the bystander effect, as you are right now, can prompt people into action when they face a crisis in the midst of a crowd (Beaman et al., 1978). A little knowledge can be empowering!

What is it about being in a group that immobilizes us? When we break down an event into its component parts, we can see that the decision to provide help in an emergency situation requires several steps. As a result, there are several places and several reasons that people don’t always get the help they need. FIGURE 13.2 presents several steps leading to helping behavior. At each step, something in the situation can waylay the process, causing us to keep walking and ignore others in need.

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Step 1: Notice the situation. The first step on the path to helping is to notice that something is amiss and that help might be needed. Although the seizure study clearly was designed to make the victim’s plight quite obvious, in the real world we often go about our day immersed in our egocentric bubble and somewhat oblivious to the needs of those around us. We don’t like to think that something as simple as being rushed for time would prevent us from offering assistance to someone in need. But this is exactly what Darley and Batson (1973) found in one intriguing experiment that was designed to provide the strongest test that situational factors can prevent people from acting on their moral values. For their study, the researchers recruited people they thought surely would be the most compassionate folks around—theology students at Princeton University. They even put half the participants in a frame of mind that should have brought compassionate values to the fore by having them prepare to give a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. In this biblical story, a Jewish man is attacked by robbers and lies, injured and suffering, on the side of the road. Several high-status individuals pass by, ignoring him. Only a low-status Samaritan stops to help, an act that is particularly significant, given the long-standing hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans.

After rehearsing this story of goodwill and compassion, these practiced preachers were sent to another building where they would give their sermons. The experimenter explained either that they had plenty of time to get there or that they were running late. As these unwitting participants followed a map to the assigned location, they passed a person hunched over and moaning in a doorway. In other words, these ministers in training encountered a modern-day version of the very parable they were about to preach on! Surely every single one of them would stop to help this poor man in pain. Alas, that was not what happened. Of those participants who were in a rush, only 10% stopped to provide help, compared with 63% of those on a leisurely stroll. Not only did simply being in a hurry prevent these men from taking the time to help, but many of them in this condition seemed not to have noticed passing a person who needed help. Leading a moral life involves stopping to notice when others need help as well as stopping to smell the roses.

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Step 2: Interpret the situation as an emergency. Assuming that you notice that something is not quite right, stepping in to provide help requires you to interpret the event as one in which help is needed. In the Kitty Genovese case, a dozen people reported hearing yelling, but most of them actually interpreted it as a lover’s quarrel rather than a murderous attack. Likewise, if you were in the study where smoke started wafting through an air vent, you would also probably feel uncertain of whether this was cause for alarm. So what does this have to do with the bystander effect? If you recall our discussion of informational social influence in chapter 7, you’ll remember that when situations are ambiguous, we take our cues from other people. If they aren’t taking any action, we take that to mean that there is no cause for alarm. So when two confederates look at the smoke and then turn back to their questionnaires, it is not too surprising that only 10% of people bother to go alert the experimenter to the growing haze in the room. Even when the situation includes other naive bystanders like yourself, if you are all glancing at each other trying to decide whether there is anything to be worried about, then no one is actually doing anything. What occurs in this situation is known as pluralistic ignorance. The inaction of all the members of the group can itself contribute to a collective ignorance that anything is wrong. In such situations, when bystanders are instead able and encouraged to communicate with one another, they are not paralyzed by pluralistic ignorance (Darley et al., 1973). So if you’re in a group and think something is wrong but are not sure, communicate with others about it!

Step 3: Take responsibility. In some of our examples, bystanders should sail through these first two steps. When you hear someone tell you outright that they need help after just informing you of her tendency toward seizures, it is a bit hard to imagine that you wouldn’t notice or be aware that she was in trouble. Nevertheless, the presence of others can prevent us from helping. This is because of another powerful effect that groups can have on us, known as diffusion of responsibility. For a victim to receive help, someone needs to decide that it will be his or her responsibility to act. When you are responsible, the moral thing to do is to help. When you are the only witness, the burden clearly rests on your shoulders. But when others are present, it is easy to imagine that someone else should or has already taken action. In fact, even being primed to think about being part of a group can make people feel less personally accountable and less likely to donate money or stay to help out the experimenter (Garcia et al., 2002). If you ever need help and there are multiple witnesses, you can solve the problem of diffusion of responsibility by picking out—talking or pointing to—a specific individual and asking that person to help. That puts the responsibility squarely on that one person.

Step 4: Decide how to help. In this day and age, many people can help by using their cellphones to call 911 instead of making a video of the emergency as it unfolds. But in some situations, a specific kind of help is needed. If you feel that you lack the expertise, it is particularly easy to imagine that someone else might be better qualified to give help. A student having a seizure might need someone with medical training, so a witness in the presence of others could hope that someone else is more knowledgeable than he or she would be. In the subway collapse study we talked about earlier, the researchers actually had to exclude two trials that they conducted when a nurse was on the train. In those cases, the nurse immediately rushed to help. When people are trained to handle emergency situations, they are more likely to burst the bubble of inaction and rush to the aid of a person in need even as others stand by and watch (Pantin & Carver, 1982).

Step 5: Decide whether to give help. You’ve noticed the event, interpreted it as an emergency, and taken responsibility, and you know what needs to be done. At this point, the only thing that might still prevent you from providing help is a quick calculation of the risks and other costs involved. When people witness a violent attack, they might be afraid to intervene for fear of getting hurt themselves. When someone has collapsed and needs CPR, witnesses might be worried that they could injure the person when performing chest compressions or otherwise make the situation worse and get sued. To counter these concerns, all 50 states and all the Canadian provinces have enacted “Good Samaritan” laws that protect people from liability for any harm they cause when they act in good faith to save another person.

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In a unique study, Levine and colleagues (2008) traveled to 24 different U.S. cities and staged the following three helping opportunities. In one situation, a research assistant dropped a pen and acted as though he or she did not notice. In a second, he or she appeared to have an injured leg and struggled to pick up a pile of dropped magazines. In a third situation, the assistant approached people and asked if they could provide change for a quarter. The cities they chose varied from small (Chattanooga, Tennessee, population 486,000), medium (Providence, Rhode Island, population 1,623,000), to large (New York, New York, population 18,641,000). Across the cities, the researchers consistently found that they received less help in larger, denser cities (FIGURE 13.3). For example, the correlation between the population density of the city and likelihood of receiving help was –0.55 when the assistant dropped the pen, –0.54 when the assistant needed help picking up magazines, and –0.47 when the assistant was trying to make change for a quarter. Notice that those correlations are negative, meaning that the bigger the city, the less likely people were to help. There is a kernel of truth to the stereotypical image of small-town friendliness.

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One caveat, however, is that it is always a bit difficult to know what to make of correlations. Do these patterns tell us something about the personalities of the people living in these different parts of the country or about local cultural norms? Are New Yorkers unhelpful contrarians? Or does living in an urban environment like New York work against whatever help-giving tendencies you might have? The jury is still out on that one. At least some research suggests that where you currently live better predicts how helpful you are than where you were born and raised (Korte, 1980). But this could mean either that the local norms of a culture change our behavior or that people choose to live in places that best reflect their personalities.

Milgram (1970) speculated that living in a dense urban area exposes people to greater stimulation, or noise pollution. Living in a city apartment, you get used to the sounds of sirens, crying babies, car alarms, late-night partiers, and impatient drivers honking their horns. To deal with the din that comes with population density, people might learn to cope by shutting out these sounds. If this urban overload hypothesis is true, then city dwellers might sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between real cries of help and a normal night in the city.