More on the Bystander Effect

Just days after delivering the sermon, A Better World, A Meaningful Life, at the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee, which included a discussion about a shocking example of the “bystander effect,” Hugo Tale-Yax died after being stabbed while coming to the aid of a threatened woman on the street in Queens, New York. He died on the sidewalk as 20 people walked by and did nothing. The scene was captured by a security video; you can watch it here.

While it is true that there are systemic and situational forces at play that influence our behavior, as revealed powerfully by Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and described in his book, The Lucifer Effect, it is also true that not all people do nothing. Not everyone is apathetic, cowardly, or lacks empathy in situations that have the potential to bring out these qualities. In this recent example, the story only begins when Hugo Tale-Yax chooses to risk his life to help another. That twenty people walked by and did nothing (one even snapping a picture!) to help him as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk, should be a wake up call.

We are all susceptible to the bystander effect, and we must be vigilant about cultivating and nourishing our own empathy so that when our time comes to act, we will be ready. We won’t have allowed cultural norms, peer pressures, creeping inertia and apathy, situations and systems that push us toward inaction, or the deadening of our sensitivity to violence, to eclipse our values.

As the late Howard Zinn wrote:

“People are practical. They want change but feel powerless, alone, do not want to be the blade of grass that sticks up above the others and is cut down. They wait for a sign from someone else who will make the first move, or the second. And at certain times in history, there are intrepid people who take the risk that if they make that first move others will follow quickly enough to prevent their being cut down. And if we understand this, we might make that first move.”

Hugo Tale-Yax was a good Samaritan who needed others. He might have lived if only one of those people walking by him had stopped to help. Can’t each of us do such a small thing?

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind and Claude and Medea, Moonbeam gold medal winner for juvenile fiction about young heroes

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