Fear of embarrassment or the “bystander problem?”

I was watching The View recently and I was astounded by a clip that the show produced for its audience. It was a video of a 78-year old man being hit by a car. What was so astonishing and disturbing about the video, was that for quite some time, no one came to his assistance. Passersby just continued about their business, some stopping to observe, but none actually checking to see if the man lying motionless in the middle of the street was still

Whoopi Goldberg, the show’s co-host had a theory as to why no one was immediately willing to help the poor man. She theorized that with shows today like Punk’d, people may have thought it was a prank and so to avoid being embarrassed on television, they chose not to act.

Coincidentally, I happen to be reading a book that relates to what happened in that video clip. In Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘The Tipping Point‘ the author describes an incident similar to that which occurred. He retells the story of Kitty Genovese, a young woman living in Queens, New York , who in 1964 was stabbed to death in the street with 38 of her neighbours looking on. She was attacked three times over the space of half an hour, but none of her neighbours called the police or helped her.

Gladwell discusses why people may have chosen not to act. He cites the work of Bibb Latane and John Darley, who call this lack of action the “bystander problem.” The theory that people in a group feel less responsibility to act.

“They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem…isn’t really a problem.”

In the case of Kitty Genovese, then, social psychologists like Latane and Darley argue, the lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream; it’s that no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream.”

I think that both Goldberg’s theory and that of Latane and Darley may apply here. In today’s world of Just for Laughs: Gags, Punk’d and Candid Camera, it would come as no surprise to me that people may have been slow to react for fear of embarrassment. But it is also entirely possible that the reason no one came to the assistance of that 78-year old man was because they all thought someone else would.