A few weeks ago, I was pedalling to work in the rain when I saw something which briefly made me well up with rage: a car parked diagonally across the cycle lane, driver clearly on the phone - a new level of "f*ck you" from a motorist to cyclists. But then I saw the skid-marks leading across the verge from the road, and I realised this was a bit more serious. I stopped and tapped on the window. She was very distraught, nearly hysterical. It was a single-vehicle accident caused by sliding out of control on the very water-logged roundabout. The thing she kept saying over and over was "nobody stopped to help! They all just keep on driving past!"
So I phoned the police and stayed with her for the next 20 minutes, until the police showed up. I was getting soaked in the rain and making myself late, but felt I owed it to her to stay put and make sure she came through it all OK. As I remounted my bike and rode away, it occurred to me that she didn't at any point thank me, and since then has made no attempt to contact me even though we discussed where I work (just across the road from her) as part of the small-talk. So in her own way, she was doing the same thing as the other drivers who had so upset her, albeit inadvertently. I probably wouldn't have stopped either, except she was literally blocking my path.
So it's easy to marvel at how disassociated we all are. A different thing entirely to do anything meaningful about it, even on a purely personal level. There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers, even less when there's a risk of being dragged into someone else's potentially violent confrontation. This is not a problem with phones, it's a problem with excessively large communities where we will probably never run into each other again. So why take the risk?
When I was 12 years old, a larger, older boy was drowning in the Chesapeake Bay. It was the kind of beach where the water is knee deep for 100 years out from shore, but then suddenly drops off to 11 feet or so of water.
He was bouncing off the bottom to get air (he couldn't swim) but his face was turning blue, and he was making choking noises and frantically splashing. I tried to grab him, and pull him to the sandbar. He clawed onto me and began drowning me. I punched and pried and kicked underwater to get him off of me, and thanked God when I got him off and got ten feet away and got air again. I yelled for help. The people on the beach 100 yards away did nothing. Perhaps it was disbelief... I ran through the knee deep water as fast as I could to them and yelled for help as I got there. Nobody moved. I wasn't thinking, just moving, and there were those styrofoam noodles on the ground next to their blanket. I snatched one without saying a word and ran back to the water faster than I ever have before.
By the time I got to him it was ugly. He was still bouncing up from the bottom, but he was barely conscious, and his face looked like something from a horror movie. I've seen some horrific shit, but a drowning person at that stage looks like a zombie. He grabbed the noodle, and I pulled him the 15 feet or so to the sandbar. 15 feet, and it was knee deep water. He couldn't walk, and I picked him up fireman's style, and he was coughing out and puking water all down my back as I carried him to shore. This was the 90s, so there were no cell phones in the rural county I lived in. I ran into a house near the beach and had the ambulance come. He almost died later of a lung infection, but he's ok now.
I asked my dad that night why nobody helped. My dad told me that I was a "helper" like him. (he was a volunteer EMT his whole life, and a volunteer fireman. Plus I watched him help strangers all the time growing up.) "Most people aren't helpers." he said.
As I've gotten older, I figured out that is the case. And when you a helper, you have to help a lot. I don't know what it is, but basically maybe 80 to 90% of people don't do shit in these situations. They subconsciously don't even notice. And being a helper sucks, a lot, sometimes, but you still do it because you don't think you just do and your gut won't let you. You can't walk away because of some deep down feeling that you are subhuman if you do.
My worst helper experience was stopping a guy in a rural NC bar's parking lot from beating his girlfriend. I started fighting him, and his GF (who he had just been beating) smashed a bottle on my head. My vision went blurry, and she jumped on my back and I fell to the ground. They both then proceeded to beat the shit out of me on the gravel parking lot ground.
Now, I avoid going into the "hipster" neighborhoods of DC. As my wife pointed out, nobody in these neighborhoods is a helper. Helpers can't live in these neighborhoods long, because inevitably you end up getting sucked into this shit and you are always alone.
Did I oversimplify? Maybe. But that's my experience. I can't help but help people in trouble, and in urban and suburban areas, its probably a bad evolutionary strategy. In the country, not so much. People care there, and they reciprocate. This is probably due to such small social groups....... Wow, I ranted for a while.
I'm so sorry for this woman...... I wish I'd have been there.
>> "As I remounted my bike and rode away, it occurred to me that she didn't at any point thank me..."
>> "There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers..."
Good on you for stopping to help but why do you feel like you should have to gain something by helping someone else? The woman you helped was still probably quite shocked and dealing with police to thank you and it's highly likely that in such a situation information like where you worked completely went over her head.
I think this is one of the reasons people have stopped helping others - they expect something in return. If I helped someone the only thing I'd expect in return would be that if the person I helped is ever in a situation where they can provide help to someone else, they'll remember the time they were helped by a stranger and take action.
Side point
>> "There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers, even less when there's a risk of being dragged into someone else's potentially violent confrontation."
The second part of this statement interests me. Is fear of something (that is highly unlikely to occur) a reason people don't get involved? It made me think of Michael Moore's conclusion in Bowling for Columbine that America's love of guns is based on fear that they will be attacked, mugged, home invaded etc. This may also be a reason people don't get involved in situation they can't control even though it's highly unlikely they are in any danger.
The beginning of your story reminded me of the wonderful commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005 [1]. It is very easy to well up with rage, but it is significantly more difficult to understand the context of another's actions. Sometimes I have to stop and tell myself "This is water" and try to put myself in the shoes of the stranger who has enraged me. I do applaud your stopping to help, and I find it unfortunate the experience was not more rewarding.
You were lucky. I forget the paper I saw it in, so I cannot link to it, but it was a story of a very similar situation. Except the person that stopped to help ended up getting mugged and beaten. The police quoted in the article advised everyone to just call in situations like this and leave it to the authorities, to not involve themselves.
I'm not saying I agree (or disagree) with that advice, but there are good reasons for not getting involved.
I currently live in Taiwan and just yesterday there was a subway stabbing - a 20s male started stabbing people on the subway. Naturally, reactions was slow as most people was playing their phones or getting some shut eye. He managed to kill 4 people, get off the subway and intimidate more people, before finally brought down by a 62 elder man.
Everyone can be armchair quarterbacks, shake their heads in disappointment, raise their fits in anger, but when you are in a situation such as the above, or witness a knife attack - you are stunned. Taipei is one of the safest city in Asia. Most of us don't see scenes such as this except on TV, and most of us don't know how to react. It's fight/intervene or flight/stay out of it.
I've taken defence classes, including Krav Maga and they all emphasize that knives are the most deadly weapon in the world due to its ease of access and the damage it can do.
Sorry it happened to the OP but I don't think society has 'become' anything. There's no proof that people are more willing to jump between a knife wielding maniac and a victim before the iPhone age.
I think the main difference is that the overall level of violence in society has gone down so much that people simply don't know how to react anymore. In the past, violence was much more present in everyday life: wars were more common, criminal activity was more common, law enforcement was lax or even non-existent, so people had to literally fight on the streets day by day just to survive. Women wouldn't go out alone even in daylight, most men were supposed to carry some sort of weapon as soon as they stepped out of walled towns (and often even while inside) and so on. After WWII, there were so many veterans around that you wouldn't dare starting sh*t for fear that somebody would kick your ass in 5 minutes.
Nowadays, people like me wouldn't know the first thing about hitting someone or defending themselves. My childhood home was in what we'd consider "a bad area" of a Southern European city (mafia and all that) but even there it took very little care to stay out of trouble. I don't think I've ever been in a physical confrontation with anyone after my 18th birthday; I wouldn't know how to use a knife or a gun, nor how to protect myself from it. Law enforcement and cultural pressure are now so efficient that they can usually limit violent activity to specific areas, so as long as I stay away from those, I'm very likely to be safe. (Every city has different attitudes and problems, of course, but that's more or less true for most of them)
If a random stranger started knifing people in my subway carriage, I'd probably freeze too - I'm a family man, not a goddamn soldier or street-fighter. Same for witnessing something like what OP describes.
I am visiting Taiwan right now. What happened yesterday was very terrifying. And it sounds even worse from someone who has experienced it. I do prefer Taipei much more than Bay Area or China. I believe here, people have learned deeply the virtue of helping and caring for others in the society and support for each other. I would love to work and live here in the future.
edit: OK, I'm being downvoted. That's fine. But, why put your irreplaceable life in mortal danger for the sake of keeping hold of replaceable consumer electronics? That's the disconnect I'm finding hard to process.
Someone should have helped her, but with hindsight she didn't want to give up her own electronics and wanted someone else to risk their life for her things.
But this situation is also very traumatic for her so there could be any number of reasons why she chose not to just hand her phone over.
I definitely can understand her being angry, but this isn't really an issue about people not paying attention as much as it is bystander effect (it seems).
Possibly because it's easy to say that afterwards, but it isn't directly relevant to the bystander effect. Sure, it's the sensible option, but that isn't on many people's minds at the time because that isn't how biology works.
Also, although it may be beside the point, you could argue that giving them what they want will just increase muggings. The way to sort out the problem is to relax laws around people helping out victims in cases like this.
I don't know why you're being down voted either. In the moment I couldn't get past her wanting all of my things, and I couldn't get past having to do my presentation and letting all of my peers and company down.
I froze and in the future that won't happen again, but you were right,
I should have thrown my phone and hobbled away.
I was thinking the same thing. Even if you can't afford another one, hand over the damn phone. And don't throw coffee over the person attacking you with a deadly weapon. Of course they will chase you.
I downvoted you, but to be honest, not because i think your advice is bad. (It's kind of reasonable.)
I downvoted you because, like the other top posts, your post managed to gather downvotes via emotional appeal, while posts that point out the actual social source of this behavior along with simple and effective advice on how to circumvent it, are left in the middle of this comment section due to lack of emotional appeal.
It was not a choice between give phone and life. I view her story as she initially had a choice between give phone and scare the mugger off by the fact it is a middle of a day in large city.
Yes, the second option did not work as planned, and it is the main point of the article.
Let's evaluate for real, the cost-benefit of intervening physically against a knife-wielding crazy person:
-- Minimum: you'll miss the day of work, have an arrest on your record which you'll have to disclose forever and which may cost you your career, may make it impossible to enter foreign countries, and so on.
-- Probable: you'll miss many days of work due to police/legal complications. Significant chance of losing your job. Significant chance of grievous personal injury. Significant chance of assault charges which will cost you (minimum) tens of thousands of dollars to defend against (more likely >$100,000).
-- Possible: Killed by knife. Killed by cop. Jailed for assault. Jailed for murder (if attacker ends up dead, you're going to be charged for sure). Newspaper columnist heaps scorn on your actions.
-- Benefits, maximum: a newspaper mentions your name in a good way. Victim says "thank you".
Yes, everyone is wondering if someone else will intervene. But also, individually, the calculus for intervening is just terrible. Highly likely consequences include months in the hospital, months in jail, cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The joke about a knife fight is that the winner is in the hospital, the loser in the morgue. Which one of those two will you be?
I want to be clear, because I understand that in my post it isn't clear. For the total of the entire event, she only had the knife out for maybe two minutes of it tops. The rest she was just following me around. And when she would get close enough, press into me, pushing me/threaten me.
I, being in an orthopedic boot, was unable to move at anything more than a quick hobble.
I feel like I miss something here. Why would you be arrested for Helping? I can see that you would have a risk of getting hurt or killed by the attacker, but why would you be arrested or killed by the Police?
I hope I would have kicked the woman in the head or wrestled her to the ground.
As a male, I suspect I wouldn't have.
I could have just called the police, but that doesn't really help in an immediate situation of one person trying to stab someone. So this situation calls for either:
1) Subduing the attacker by pinning them.
2) Doing enough damage to the attacker that they can't move.
If they are on top of the victim, they maybe are in a good position for me to run up and corner-kick their head and end things with a quick concussion. I can't tell from the prose. Otherwise, it would be better to just restrain her and pin her to the ground.
So I'm either a man pinning screaming woman to the ground in a public place or a man who is viscously beating a woman in public.
> I'm [..] a man pinning screaming woman to the ground in a public place
I can just imagine how this goes down. You grab the perpetrator, wrestle her to the ground violently. You have to lean deeply over her to restrain both her hands. The victim runs away. The woman you're holding starts to scream and shout that you're assaulting her. The police arrive.
You are fucked with a capital F.
> a man [..] beating a woman in public
... the victim runs away. The police arrive. The police tell the other guys in the holding cell that you're a woman-beater.
As someone who has been attacked and/or robbed several times in cities like Brussels, two things I'm sad to have learned:
1) Your reality changes. At any point, in every street, someone/some gang can step up and change your situation to something vastly different than the reality the other people around you are in at that moment.
2) Nobody cares. People don't want to get involved. They are not aware of the situation, or even when they are, they are not in it themselves. As a woman you might have the luck of a knight in shiny armour nearby who feels obliged to step up and help, but as a fit male, all bets are off. Few want to get between "men fighting" – to them you are a perpetrator, not a victim.
The loneliness and absurdity of such situations are hard to get over. Years later I'm still more aware of my environment whenever I'm out, and I always check for exits and whom not to turn my back to. It has also made me more likely to reach out and help others in such situations, partly because I can relate, and partly because I'm more aware that something doesn't feel quite right.
You must learn to accept that if you have belongings, you might lose them. Or alternatively, be willing to pointlessly fight like hell with a random stranger for little or no benefit. The second option might cost a hell of a lot more overall, even when you "win".
It's not a mobile phone thing; I got punched in the face on a commuter train 20 years ago and none of the crowd got involved then either.
It's partly bystander effect ("I'll leave it to someone else to intervene") and partly a very real fear of the intervention going wrong. Maybe you get stabbed. Maybe the police get involved and you end up with an assault conviction and consequent expulsion from the middle class. Maybe the scene isn't all it seems (setup for robbery, or domestic where both parties turn on the intervenor).
Commuting and the mass-population city kind of relies on us forming the habit of studiously ignoring one another, and it's a hard habit to shake in an emergency.
There have been quite a few stories where people that intervened were themselves charged with assaults. There's been burglars breaking into houses whose owners were charged with invasion of privacy for having security cameras in their own house.
Taking justice in your own hand - helping people out in a violent situation - is frowned upon and discouraged. Perhaps even moreso in the US, where it's much more likely that people carry guns and people - bystanders or those directly involved - get killed.
But as I'm sure is mentioned elsewhere, the main causes of inaction are the exceptionality of the situation (despite what the media wants you to believe) and a group mentality (nobody's doing anything, so why should I? Alternatively, maybe the group is seeing something I haven't, could be dangerous)
Why people might not want to get involved? Every situation is unique but 1. How do they know these two women don't know each other? 2. How many people actually saw the knife? Not everyone has 20/20 vision either. 3. Sounds like both of these women were arrested. Hypothetical hero could have been arrested too. 4. If you're going to intervene in a dangerous situation, you could be sued. 5. There could be a more dangerous accomplice nearby to make sure she gets the job done. 6. What if the woman with the knife is in a gang? Will the gang retaliate tomorrow? 7. Maybe she has a gun in another pocket? 8. How many people in the crowd know how to defend against a knife attack? 9. Maybe I watched too many Zatoichi episodes but "no good deed goes unpunished." ;-)
I was in a similar situation once and just gave up my phone and mug money. I was somewhat prepared because I was warned it would happen. Maybe this book saved my life http://www.roughguides.com/shop/rough-guide-new-york-city/ As I was pulled into a dark alley, a young woman walked by like it was completely normal to see someone mugged. Then I packed my things and left NY and never looked back.
long story short, what's going on in people's minds when they don't help is that, probably someone else will step in, and playing hero will probably just get in the way.
which, isn't that helpful if 100% of the bystanders are thinking that. It's somebody else's problem.
there's a simple remedy- Don't scream "help! anyone! help!"
scream "Hey you, burly looking dude. Help! yes you!"
'
This is what psychologists say.
until the evidence comes in, I'm skeptical that it would work. but it's better than repeating these stories again and again.
Exactly this. The same goes for calling emergency services - there are cases where response was delayed because everyone was assuming someone else was doing it. I've been the one person who did it before, I'd say due to having an understanding of this. It's really something people should be taught about in school and how to avoid both participating in it and letting it happen.
It may be partly "somebody else will fix this", but also largely "is this really what it seems"? It could be a genuine robbery, or a piece of improv street theatre, or a sociology experiment. And since nobody else is responding, maybe they see something I don't.
As an aside, apparently she pretty much did what you suggest (which is the standard advice to deal with the bystander effect) in that she asked one particular bystander to help her, but even that didn't work.
I wish this wasn't the case, but as a man, there is no way I am getting involved in a fight between two strange women. No way. There is no upside for me and unlimited downside, in fact that downside is virtually guaranteed.
I have friend that once intervened between two drunk women fighting on the bus. What he got out of it was that both turned on him, and threw stuff at him. Nobody else on the bus turned to help him, but he managed to get the women off the bus though (after they attacked him). As a man stepping into a fight between women, you have limited options when things go wrong.
The common rule is that men don't hit women, so if they start attacking you (which, hypocritically is perfectly okay), you can only hope to defend yourself. Was it a man though, you could fight back, but that still means you've just put yourself in danger by trying to help.
The one difference in the story though is that a guy that knew the victim realized what was going on, walked with her a couple steps and then left her on her own.
I can somewhat understand not getting involved with strangers - you don't know if the apparent victim is actually the instigator or even if the two are pulling a scam together. But if I even peripherally knew a woman and she told me she was being robbed at knifepoint, I would hope I wouldn't leave her to her fate like this guy did.
I would at least take my own dummy wallet out and give it to the mugger in exchange for leaving everyone alone. It has about $20 and a bunch of used up American Express gift cards in it.
I don't really intend to risk my life going up against a knife-wielding crazy person, just so you'd be able to keep your phone.
I would probably call the police though, which was also my reaction last a bigger fight happened near me.
For me to risk my life for you, I would have to know you somewhat well, and then I would very likely intervene.
It's not only the bystander effect, but also the quite rational question "do I want to risk my own life for the sake of this woman I don't know, in this situation I know very little about?"
Once, my friend intervened in two drunk girls fighting each other. He was calm, but instead they just turned against him.
It's simply a game of pros and cons, and I can very much follow the community thing that Anderkent mentions in another thread.
One is diffusion of responsibility or bystander effects, which I think she's hinting at. In a crowd an individual is less likely to take action. I think this has a lot to do with our social instincts. Being in a crowd of strangers is a new thing. We aren't built for it.
On our own, we make decisions for ourselves. That's easy. A group is supposed to be a family or troop or somesuch. These will usually have a leader. Someone responsible for deciding that this is a mugging, that we're on the victim's side and that we are going to join the fight. I'm not sure it has to be a literal leader, but there needs to be a pre-established decision making process and the individual needs to know where they stand in it.
A second issue is that this is not really a question of "willingness to help" in the intellectual sense. It's a question of instinct.
A third is that in a city (or in modern life in general) we are surrounded by other people's problems. The homeless person we step over, the domestic violence sounds we don't call the cops on, the volunteer help line where we don't volunteer at and the charity we don't contribute to.
This is complicated. I think it's more about living in cities, nations and the global village than it is about iphones.
If you have a dog with an injured paw then different people will willingly help you (dog lovers) than those people that will willingly help you find a lost cat (cat lovers). Same with directions, some random tourist might not be as willing to help you with directions as a native, the tourist could probably get the maps out on their phone, but they will not feel as if that is the thing to do. However, if you were lost in their home town then they might walk you to where you needed to go.
As a cyclist I often help other cyclists with flat tyres etc. and you try stopping me from helping out. I spent a decade working in the cycle trade so, for me, fixing someone else's bike is merely an opportunity to keep my skills fresh. I cannot say that first aid is my thing, however, I am sure that someone else will keep the patient warm until the authorities arrive, so I auto-delegate myself to warning traffic and collecting debris from the road in such circumstances. Because I don't do cars, I am unlikely to offer to bump start someone's car or help them back in if they have locked their keys inside. However, others that have those skills will take up the opportunity to help.
When it comes to violent confrontational circumstances, there was a time when I would have a go, however, after getting my head kicked in by four muggers I no longer feel inclined to get involved. However, I do have friends that have been doormen and they will leap to the opportunity to do a little bit of enforcing - it is in their skill set.
Most people are willing and able to help out if they can and if they have confidence in their usefulness in a given situation. The problem is that when there is some rare and outrageous act of violence going on that there are very few people around who have 'enforcing' in their skill set. Hence the apparent 'bystander effect'.
Wow, scary stuff. I've been there with crazy people, alone, at night, at a T-stop in Boston. One thing you can do, is put your keys in your hand, and make a fist with the keys pointed outward from your knuckles. That will make punches way more effective and one good punch could blind your assailant, which is exactly what you want to do.
Another thing to consider is getting a gun or at least supporting gun rights. Not a lot of unarmed people are going to help you against a crazy person with a knife. If someone was caring a gun, they could have helped. If she were caring, then she could have put an end to this nightmare herself.
There's a saying in the gun rights community, "The second you need a cop, they're always minutes away." All the cops I know agree with that statement. It's not a reflection on them, just that they can't be everywhere all the time.
I hope her injuries (both physical and mental) heal quickly.
> If someone was caring a gun, they could have helped. If she were caring, then she could have put an end to this nightmare herself.
No, that is not how it would work out in most (if not all) cases. Especially not in such a public place. And especially not if the gun was contained in something, e.g. her purse.
Even if that person were a great shot, in a (even moderately) close combat fight with a knife-wielder, she would most likely not be able to pull/unlock the gun before being stabbed, or miss and/or hit others or just be plain too scared/untrained to keep that much control.
Even if it worked, there would be the question of ethics and legality of wounding/killing another person to save her possessions. The legality may not be an issue in (many states in) the US, but even there not always a clear case and most likely will have some legal procedure.
If she were able to use the gun for intimidation and get the assailant to run away, that might work, but the attacker is obviously beyond quite some normal mental restrictions when threatening to kill her in a public place and might not easily be deterred.
Guns are the perfect tool for killing people when you know you want/plan to kill people. They are effective in wounding too, if you're able to hit where it doesn't kill. They are mostly useless in not getting wounded/killed by someone who wants to wound/kill you.
Bystander effect aside, this is really shocking if it's true. I once got robbed in broad daylight at a bus station in La Paz (Bolivia), with dozens of people standing nearby and watching everything happen, but then again this was in a developing country.
I think part of the explanation is that such situations occur pretty rarely in the developed world, so people do not know what's the appropriate reaction: Fight back and risk getting attacked as well, scream for help, just call the police? It probably can be compared to first-aid situations, where most people seem to get completely paralyzed and are unable to help the injured person. Maybe governments should offer seminars where people learn to react properly in such situations, just like in the first-aid seminars that you're required to attend when you get your driving license.
one other challenge may be that in San Francisco there's so many crazy homeless people, you never know what could happen. I saw a homeless guy fall over in front of a bus last week and waited a few seconds, no body did something; I was just about to go other to help pick the guy up, but good job I didn't - as he was just crazy - got up and started trashing all the trashcans around him etc.
This really shocked me when I visited SF last year. We have issues with homelessness, drug abuse and lack of support in some of Scotland's bigger cities, but SF was on a whole other level.
We seen people throw themselves in front of cars then demand cash from the driver, destroy restrooms in fast food joints, and just sit the street talking incoherently to themselves. We were there for less than a week.
I wondered if perhaps while we've not been great at reducing homelessness here, we have better support for those with acute mental illness.
I know every large city has its problems, and I absolutely loved visiting SF (I'd go back in a heartbeat), but seeing this just made me sad.
I'm curious - does anyone else have a mental habit of trying to notice bystander effect situations and taking it as your job to handle them if you're able?
I've had this habit for about a year. So far, called the police too late to do anything about it twice (once because my phone was dead, once from a combination of negligence and not knowing the right number to call), and once called the emergency number for a guy who fainted in public (but ran off before help could arrive). In the last case, a handful of other bystanders also stopped to help the guy, so bystander effect mysteriously didn't work that day. So I haven't been terribly helpful to anyone, but I was surprised how often I saw problems once I was looking for it.
(I don't think I would have been terribly helpful in this situation, though - I don't know how to break up a fight without being hurt, and probably wouldn't have thought of some of the better ideas like trying to single out a strong-looking person in the crowd and get them to help.)
I attribute this to living under an authoritarian government that supposedly takes care of dangers to society. We're just bystanders and taught not to meddle because the police will take care of it.
I've lived in different countries and have seen different reactions where people are used to feeling responsible for their peers because they know the government doesn't care, is not efficient, or otherwise limited.
Of course, some people will also be reluctant to get stabbed for a complete stranger.
It's the bystander effect - this is why you always ask specific people to help. Myself, I like to think I'd have helped if I was there, but I know how easy that is to say, even if I am certainly someone who should. Many people who were there probably feel terrible that they didn't, but sometimes in an emergency, people who haven't thought about what they'd do will freeze up.
Is it just me or does she seem to have a sense of entitlement? All throughout the article, she seems to tell herself, one way or another, "clearly this can't happen to me. I'm important. Too important."
Is this title taking a shot at Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In? If so, I'm not sure what the connection between the two is. Anyone care to explain/correct me?
I understand this that the society, media, politicians, everyone is busy focusing on the "social media justice warrior" issues, but we're turning a blind eye towards the real problems in the world (people dying, getting mugged, starving, ...)
Isn't that about acting confident and forward when asking for jobs, raises, working on your career, etc.? Well no one was helping her because they were all playing with their phones or thinking about their jobs and didn't want to be slowed down on the way to work, etc..
I admit I never would have helped besides maybe removing myself from the scene and calling authorities because the chances are high I'd be charged with assault myself, hurt, detained by police, etc.. Once you get an arrest you are effectively impossible to hire for most companies the rest of your life.
> Is this how disconnected from the real world we’ve become?
This is an example of the real world. Its nothing new, nor likely to change. History is full of "bad things" happening to people, on a large and small scale, that happened because others did nothing to stop it.
My comment does not mean that people should not help others who are in need, but suggesting this is something new - possibly due to changes in technology - reinforces the (wrong) idea that people think the world is a safe place.
OP also didn't react as hindsight tells us the answer. Hand it over. Why did they value something crappy like money over their life, are they so superficial? (Probably not)
We've been told a million times just to hand it over, but OP still didn't.
Concentrate on the long term issues, there are more and they are solvable through logic, like solving homelessness.
Don't worry so much about how people react in unexpected situations. Worry more about peoples long term decision making, that scares me.
You are correct, in hindsight, I would have handed it over, halfway through fighting it over, while bleeding I contemplated handing it over? What stopped me from doing so in the beginning?
I had the largest presentation of my life that night for a public audience of 200 people and letting my company and CTO down. I couldn't imagine losing all of my things and not being able to do so. Yes it was a very selfish driver at the time, but my brain couldn't move beyond that thought.
I wonder how much of this is that people don't know what to do. If we were listing the qualities that would encourage someone to help what would they be?
1) Believe that your intervention will do good/be effective.
2) Have a personal relationship with the victim.
3) Be thinking of the victim as a person rather than a piece of the scenery.
4) Perceive the risk to self (legal/physical) to be low.
5) Don't believe someone else will do it.
6) Don't believe that it's a setup where the 'victim' will turn on you.
I'm not saying those are the things that matter, they're just the things that came to mind.
And how many of them typically apply?
This was a knife attack, and that probably takes care of 1 and 4. I've seen untrained people fighting in the street, and it's the equivalent of a monkey slinging shit. Add to that that a knife is less to do with careful application of skill - it's more constant. It's entirely possible, if people had intervened, we'd be talking about multiple people seriously injured, perhaps scarred for life, or killed.
2 doesn't apply, 3 could go either way, 5 might be the case - there were a lot of people there. 6, happens, but again might go either way.
...
And there's a thought - did they see the knife? or did they just see two people having a domestic and screaming at each other? I imagine that might decrease the chances of anything happening.
I was in a slightly similar situation the other day. I'm a male (white), walking to boxing class when about 0.75 blocks away, I see some kid getting attacked by... wait for it... 4 other kids. All women. All African-American.
There was a group of about 12-15 high school age girls and 10 of them were just watching 3 or 4 of them gang up on 1 of them.
WTF do I do here? I had the same thought process as many people in this thread. I could get involved, but realistically, there's absolutely no way I'm going to go try to break up a fight with that many people in it, let alone teenage girls.
I watched for about 5 seconds before I started to get my phone out to call the cops (which I also felt bad about b/c... wtf are they going to do... something needs to happen now).
Luckily for the kid, she managed to get away and they stopped pursuing her. But man, the feeling of helplessness sucked pretty hard.
> I know San Francisco is a tight-knit community, and we like to think that we’d jump to help one another.
Really? Have you SEEN the homeless population there? Who the fuck is helping them?
> But what the hell was that? I’ve read all the psychology books. I know the typical explanations.
....then why are you asking? It's bystander effect, plain and simple. If you're expecting San Franciscans to go against human nature just because they write code, sorry, ain't gonna happen.
Get some pepper spray and some self defense classes and learn to fight dirty. Don't blame other people for not saving you; they have no obligation to.
> Is this how disconnected from the real world we’ve become?
It's how disconnected the author has become. I'm glad she's now got perspective on how the real world works. (I'm also glad she came out of that safe and sound; sounds like a really scary fucked up situation)
I was so certain this was absolutely impossible in the US. This is quite common in France, where a girl was raped in the train wagon and nobody did a ything. We have a law that makes it illegal NOT to help the other person if there's a danger. Yet noone moves.
I tried an experiment once quite recently on a train trip, to try and ask some young hysterical girl to calm herself down ( she was basically insulting everybody). What happend was this : seing that someone did something made the other passengers decided to act and speak their mind as well. The problem is that some guy decided to go physical on her and hit her on the face. I had to ask for help stopping him this time.
My conclusion was that :
1/ it only takes one person to make all the other personn move as well.
2/ you have to be really carefull because depending on the level of anger of the crowd, things can get extremely violent.
I expect to gather quite a few downvotes for this viewpoint but here it goes.
There is no way I would have intervened. I am a male and I can't see my involvement in the situation working out for me at all. Now you might say I'm wrong for putting my self-preservation above that on Kristen's but this isn't just about preventing physical harm to myself. In fact if I knew that I would only be cut (non-fatal) then I wouldn't have this stance. Instead I am worried about the ramifications of "attacking" a women in public like this.
We have seen countless times in the media where someone coming to the aid of someone in danger (not in an attack situation) has been sued for helping (just google "rescuer sued"). So if trying to help someone alone can get you screwed just think about what can happen when there are two people involved. What assurances do I have that I won't inadvertently hurt Kristen in the process and that she won't decide to sue me? Or that the attacker in this situation won't sue me for "attacking her" while trying to prevent her from stabbing Kristen (google "attacker sues victim")? I'll tell you: NONE. For all we know the attacker will sue Kristen for throwing hot coffee on her, this story isn't over yet.
Let's examine an example:
I intervene, I kick the attacker in the head to get her off Kristen. Let's ignore for now the chance that a bystander only see's me kick this women in the head and assumes it was unprovoked and then attacks me. Then Kristen gets up, shakily thanks me and the disappears into the crowd. I am left standing over the body of a women that I just physically assaulted. A bystander had pulled out their phone to film what was happening but only caught me kicking the women. If I leave the scene then there is a chance I will be hunted down and if I stay at the very least I am going to spend the rest of the day at the police station. The attacker stuffers brain damage from the kick and the family sues me for all I'm worth and I spend the rest of my life paying off the debt while waking up daily to the thought of "No good deed...".
I understand this is a worst case outcome but there is no way in hell I am going to risk my life AND if I survive the remainder of my life over a $600 phone and the contents of her bag, it simply is not worth it. I'd cover those costs with my first meeting with an attorney. If the attacker was actually stabbing Kristen then it would be a different story but that's not what happened. I've talked to people trained in various martial arts and the vast majority of them say that if they were mugged they would hand over their belongings. Mind you these are people trained to fight (whereas I can assure you I have no such training) but they know their lives are not worth their possessions.
TL;DR: A phone and purse are not worth the victims or a potential rescuers life (both immediate and long term)
You're assuming too much when you assume that a bystander will attack you. So many people saw the random attacker assault Kristen, no one did a thing about it. You will be the 1 in 100 that would do something about it, chances are there will be no one else.
>If the attacker was actually stabbing Kristen then it would be a different story but that's not what happened
"suddenly we were brawling, she swinging at me with a knife in one hand"
"I felt blood flowing down my face.
'SOMEBODY HELP ME!'
People stare and watch."
"Please, she’s got a knife, she’s trying to stab me, please! ANYONE!"
Seems to me that it was pretty clear that actual knife attacking was taking place. She's got blood streaming down her face crying blue murder about a girl with a knife - you wouldn't help because she hadn't actually been stabbed yet?
I never witnessed a robbery or violence where innocent people where getting hurt (likely due to my someone scary look?), but it's not because of phones. It's because people are in their routines, if you would walk the same road for 10 years and suddenly someone put a hole in the middle, you'd fall in.
Plus people are sheep, if not a single person is crazy enough to start and help someone else, then most of the time nobody will.
"Actually, this happens all time here in Brazil. But our problem right now is exactly because people are beating thieves near to death. A good solution is one that would fix both cases."
Just in case some of you here were losing faith in bystanders worldwide. ;-]
well, it the same when you pick the goat from the herd for slaughter. It screams a lot, but the herd does not care. Well behaved, docile, bred to be ignorant of each over.. Just like typical civilized man.
What's bugging me are the trolling comments about how she doesn't deserve help because she's a feminist. I suppose this is to be expected these days, though.
hard to believe this is true, I'm in Toronto and some of the dark corners of US society are alien....but it's just sad. And I shouldn't have spent too much time reading the comments on here about hypothetical not-helping scenarios etc. sigh. Tough situation/sad.
I mean, this is an aspect of human nature that's been pretty well documented for decades, at least. It might make you uncomfortable, but it's also not some unusual, hard-to-believe example of how "the dark corners of US society are alien".
This is NOT a 'murica story. If you look elsewhere in the thread, there are links to this sort of thing happening around the world.
It is a "bystander intervention" and "diffusion of responsibility" human-psychology problem. Both of those are Googleable terms and both have practical solutions in how to bypass them; unfortunately, typically only people who've taken some Psych coursework are aware of them.
Compounding this is the fact that there are MANY crazy homeless people in San Francisco, so you tend to automatically filter unusual behavior out.
Get a government that cares about their people (mental health care for everybody who needs it & a solid social security net) and these kind of stories should become very rare.
I down voted this because most mentally ill people I know don't want "care". They don't want pills and they don't want to be normal.
It's our bill of rights that prevents us from forcing help on these people and, while it's sad for them, I rather like our strict policy on NOT being able to just call someone crazy and force them into an institution.
m0nty|11 years ago
So I phoned the police and stayed with her for the next 20 minutes, until the police showed up. I was getting soaked in the rain and making myself late, but felt I owed it to her to stay put and make sure she came through it all OK. As I remounted my bike and rode away, it occurred to me that she didn't at any point thank me, and since then has made no attempt to contact me even though we discussed where I work (just across the road from her) as part of the small-talk. So in her own way, she was doing the same thing as the other drivers who had so upset her, albeit inadvertently. I probably wouldn't have stopped either, except she was literally blocking my path.
So it's easy to marvel at how disassociated we all are. A different thing entirely to do anything meaningful about it, even on a purely personal level. There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers, even less when there's a risk of being dragged into someone else's potentially violent confrontation. This is not a problem with phones, it's a problem with excessively large communities where we will probably never run into each other again. So why take the risk?
JPKab|11 years ago
He was bouncing off the bottom to get air (he couldn't swim) but his face was turning blue, and he was making choking noises and frantically splashing. I tried to grab him, and pull him to the sandbar. He clawed onto me and began drowning me. I punched and pried and kicked underwater to get him off of me, and thanked God when I got him off and got ten feet away and got air again. I yelled for help. The people on the beach 100 yards away did nothing. Perhaps it was disbelief... I ran through the knee deep water as fast as I could to them and yelled for help as I got there. Nobody moved. I wasn't thinking, just moving, and there were those styrofoam noodles on the ground next to their blanket. I snatched one without saying a word and ran back to the water faster than I ever have before.
By the time I got to him it was ugly. He was still bouncing up from the bottom, but he was barely conscious, and his face looked like something from a horror movie. I've seen some horrific shit, but a drowning person at that stage looks like a zombie. He grabbed the noodle, and I pulled him the 15 feet or so to the sandbar. 15 feet, and it was knee deep water. He couldn't walk, and I picked him up fireman's style, and he was coughing out and puking water all down my back as I carried him to shore. This was the 90s, so there were no cell phones in the rural county I lived in. I ran into a house near the beach and had the ambulance come. He almost died later of a lung infection, but he's ok now.
I asked my dad that night why nobody helped. My dad told me that I was a "helper" like him. (he was a volunteer EMT his whole life, and a volunteer fireman. Plus I watched him help strangers all the time growing up.) "Most people aren't helpers." he said.
As I've gotten older, I figured out that is the case. And when you a helper, you have to help a lot. I don't know what it is, but basically maybe 80 to 90% of people don't do shit in these situations. They subconsciously don't even notice. And being a helper sucks, a lot, sometimes, but you still do it because you don't think you just do and your gut won't let you. You can't walk away because of some deep down feeling that you are subhuman if you do.
My worst helper experience was stopping a guy in a rural NC bar's parking lot from beating his girlfriend. I started fighting him, and his GF (who he had just been beating) smashed a bottle on my head. My vision went blurry, and she jumped on my back and I fell to the ground. They both then proceeded to beat the shit out of me on the gravel parking lot ground.
Now, I avoid going into the "hipster" neighborhoods of DC. As my wife pointed out, nobody in these neighborhoods is a helper. Helpers can't live in these neighborhoods long, because inevitably you end up getting sucked into this shit and you are always alone.
Did I oversimplify? Maybe. But that's my experience. I can't help but help people in trouble, and in urban and suburban areas, its probably a bad evolutionary strategy. In the country, not so much. People care there, and they reciprocate. This is probably due to such small social groups....... Wow, I ranted for a while.
I'm so sorry for this woman...... I wish I'd have been there.
k-mcgrady|11 years ago
Good on you for stopping to help but why do you feel like you should have to gain something by helping someone else? The woman you helped was still probably quite shocked and dealing with police to thank you and it's highly likely that in such a situation information like where you worked completely went over her head.
I think this is one of the reasons people have stopped helping others - they expect something in return. If I helped someone the only thing I'd expect in return would be that if the person I helped is ever in a situation where they can provide help to someone else, they'll remember the time they were helped by a stranger and take action.
Side point
>> "There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers, even less when there's a risk of being dragged into someone else's potentially violent confrontation."
The second part of this statement interests me. Is fear of something (that is highly unlikely to occur) a reason people don't get involved? It made me think of Michael Moore's conclusion in Bowling for Columbine that America's love of guns is based on fear that they will be attacked, mugged, home invaded etc. This may also be a reason people don't get involved in situation they can't control even though it's highly unlikely they are in any danger.
sonnym|11 years ago
1. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf
Fuxy|11 years ago
The only people that will help you is family and friends.
Risking your life, safety or just wasting time for the sake of helping a stranger happens as often as people donating large amounts to charity.
So if you want to fight your robber you better have a large knife or gun on your person because people won't help you.
RogerL|11 years ago
I'm not saying I agree (or disagree) with that advice, but there are good reasons for not getting involved.
crashoverdrive|11 years ago
Are we to suggest that community support is as vestigial as the tailbone?
justjimmy|11 years ago
I currently live in Taiwan and just yesterday there was a subway stabbing - a 20s male started stabbing people on the subway. Naturally, reactions was slow as most people was playing their phones or getting some shut eye. He managed to kill 4 people, get off the subway and intimidate more people, before finally brought down by a 62 elder man.
Everyone can be armchair quarterbacks, shake their heads in disappointment, raise their fits in anger, but when you are in a situation such as the above, or witness a knife attack - you are stunned. Taipei is one of the safest city in Asia. Most of us don't see scenes such as this except on TV, and most of us don't know how to react. It's fight/intervene or flight/stay out of it.
I've taken defence classes, including Krav Maga and they all emphasize that knives are the most deadly weapon in the world due to its ease of access and the damage it can do.
Sorry it happened to the OP but I don't think society has 'become' anything. There's no proof that people are more willing to jump between a knife wielding maniac and a victim before the iPhone age.
toyg|11 years ago
Nowadays, people like me wouldn't know the first thing about hitting someone or defending themselves. My childhood home was in what we'd consider "a bad area" of a Southern European city (mafia and all that) but even there it took very little care to stay out of trouble. I don't think I've ever been in a physical confrontation with anyone after my 18th birthday; I wouldn't know how to use a knife or a gun, nor how to protect myself from it. Law enforcement and cultural pressure are now so efficient that they can usually limit violent activity to specific areas, so as long as I stay away from those, I'm very likely to be safe. (Every city has different attitudes and problems, of course, but that's more or less true for most of them)
If a random stranger started knifing people in my subway carriage, I'd probably freeze too - I'm a family man, not a goddamn soldier or street-fighter. Same for witnessing something like what OP describes.
hipaulshi|11 years ago
hobbes|11 years ago
edit: OK, I'm being downvoted. That's fine. But, why put your irreplaceable life in mortal danger for the sake of keeping hold of replaceable consumer electronics? That's the disconnect I'm finding hard to process.
swang|11 years ago
Someone should have helped her, but with hindsight she didn't want to give up her own electronics and wanted someone else to risk their life for her things.
But this situation is also very traumatic for her so there could be any number of reasons why she chose not to just hand her phone over.
I definitely can understand her being angry, but this isn't really an issue about people not paying attention as much as it is bystander effect (it seems).
blueskin_|11 years ago
Also, although it may be beside the point, you could argue that giving them what they want will just increase muggings. The way to sort out the problem is to relax laws around people helping out victims in cases like this.
crashoverdrive|11 years ago
k-mcgrady|11 years ago
Mithaldu|11 years ago
I downvoted you because, like the other top posts, your post managed to gather downvotes via emotional appeal, while posts that point out the actual social source of this behavior along with simple and effective advice on how to circumvent it, are left in the middle of this comment section due to lack of emotional appeal.
alandarev|11 years ago
Yes, the second option did not work as planned, and it is the main point of the article.
jwmoz|11 years ago
And also, did the OP not consider the potential consequences of throwing a boiling drink in the face of another person armed with a knife?
icebraining|11 years ago
jellicle|11 years ago
-- Minimum: you'll miss the day of work, have an arrest on your record which you'll have to disclose forever and which may cost you your career, may make it impossible to enter foreign countries, and so on.
-- Probable: you'll miss many days of work due to police/legal complications. Significant chance of losing your job. Significant chance of grievous personal injury. Significant chance of assault charges which will cost you (minimum) tens of thousands of dollars to defend against (more likely >$100,000).
-- Possible: Killed by knife. Killed by cop. Jailed for assault. Jailed for murder (if attacker ends up dead, you're going to be charged for sure). Newspaper columnist heaps scorn on your actions.
-- Benefits, maximum: a newspaper mentions your name in a good way. Victim says "thank you".
Yes, everyone is wondering if someone else will intervene. But also, individually, the calculus for intervening is just terrible. Highly likely consequences include months in the hospital, months in jail, cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The joke about a knife fight is that the winner is in the hospital, the loser in the morgue. Which one of those two will you be?
crashoverdrive|11 years ago
I, being in an orthopedic boot, was unable to move at anything more than a quick hobble.
VonGallifrey|11 years ago
afarrell|11 years ago
I could have just called the police, but that doesn't really help in an immediate situation of one person trying to stab someone. So this situation calls for either: 1) Subduing the attacker by pinning them. 2) Doing enough damage to the attacker that they can't move. If they are on top of the victim, they maybe are in a good position for me to run up and corner-kick their head and end things with a quick concussion. I can't tell from the prose. Otherwise, it would be better to just restrain her and pin her to the ground.
So I'm either a man pinning screaming woman to the ground in a public place or a man who is viscously beating a woman in public.
No thanks, "Real Men" don't hit girls. http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/brand-what-do-you...
Especially not in public where "defend the woman being attacked" is a fantasy for a whole bunch of people.
venus|11 years ago
> I'm [..] a man pinning screaming woman to the ground in a public place
I can just imagine how this goes down. You grab the perpetrator, wrestle her to the ground violently. You have to lean deeply over her to restrain both her hands. The victim runs away. The woman you're holding starts to scream and shout that you're assaulting her. The police arrive.
You are fucked with a capital F.
> a man [..] beating a woman in public
... the victim runs away. The police arrive. The police tell the other guys in the holding cell that you're a woman-beater.
You get the picture.
stuaxo|11 years ago
wvh|11 years ago
1) Your reality changes. At any point, in every street, someone/some gang can step up and change your situation to something vastly different than the reality the other people around you are in at that moment.
2) Nobody cares. People don't want to get involved. They are not aware of the situation, or even when they are, they are not in it themselves. As a woman you might have the luck of a knight in shiny armour nearby who feels obliged to step up and help, but as a fit male, all bets are off. Few want to get between "men fighting" – to them you are a perpetrator, not a victim.
The loneliness and absurdity of such situations are hard to get over. Years later I'm still more aware of my environment whenever I'm out, and I always check for exits and whom not to turn my back to. It has also made me more likely to reach out and help others in such situations, partly because I can relate, and partly because I'm more aware that something doesn't feel quite right.
You must learn to accept that if you have belongings, you might lose them. Or alternatively, be willing to pointlessly fight like hell with a random stranger for little or no benefit. The second option might cost a hell of a lot more overall, even when you "win".
pjc50|11 years ago
It's partly bystander effect ("I'll leave it to someone else to intervene") and partly a very real fear of the intervention going wrong. Maybe you get stabbed. Maybe the police get involved and you end up with an assault conviction and consequent expulsion from the middle class. Maybe the scene isn't all it seems (setup for robbery, or domestic where both parties turn on the intervenor).
Commuting and the mass-population city kind of relies on us forming the habit of studiously ignoring one another, and it's a hard habit to shake in an emergency.
Cthulhu_|11 years ago
Taking justice in your own hand - helping people out in a violent situation - is frowned upon and discouraged. Perhaps even moreso in the US, where it's much more likely that people carry guns and people - bystanders or those directly involved - get killed.
But as I'm sure is mentioned elsewhere, the main causes of inaction are the exceptionality of the situation (despite what the media wants you to believe) and a group mentality (nobody's doing anything, so why should I? Alternatively, maybe the group is seeing something I haven't, could be dangerous)
pjbrunet|11 years ago
I was in a similar situation once and just gave up my phone and mug money. I was somewhat prepared because I was warned it would happen. Maybe this book saved my life http://www.roughguides.com/shop/rough-guide-new-york-city/ As I was pulled into a dark alley, a young woman walked by like it was completely normal to see someone mugged. Then I packed my things and left NY and never looked back.
TheZenPsycho|11 years ago
wikipedia entry here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
long story short, what's going on in people's minds when they don't help is that, probably someone else will step in, and playing hero will probably just get in the way.
which, isn't that helpful if 100% of the bystanders are thinking that. It's somebody else's problem.
there's a simple remedy- Don't scream "help! anyone! help!" scream "Hey you, burly looking dude. Help! yes you!" ' This is what psychologists say. until the evidence comes in, I'm skeptical that it would work. but it's better than repeating these stories again and again.
blueskin_|11 years ago
Exactly this. The same goes for calling emergency services - there are cases where response was delayed because everyone was assuming someone else was doing it. I've been the one person who did it before, I'd say due to having an understanding of this. It's really something people should be taught about in school and how to avoid both participating in it and letting it happen.
jeroen94704|11 years ago
As an aside, apparently she pretty much did what you suggest (which is the standard advice to deal with the bystander effect) in that she asked one particular bystander to help her, but even that didn't work.
netcan|11 years ago
Is this hypothesis testable?
venus|11 years ago
This is the way things are in 2014.
Tehnix|11 years ago
The common rule is that men don't hit women, so if they start attacking you (which, hypocritically is perfectly okay), you can only hope to defend yourself. Was it a man though, you could fight back, but that still means you've just put yourself in danger by trying to help.
300bps|11 years ago
I can somewhat understand not getting involved with strangers - you don't know if the apparent victim is actually the instigator or even if the two are pulling a scam together. But if I even peripherally knew a woman and she told me she was being robbed at knifepoint, I would hope I wouldn't leave her to her fate like this guy did.
I would at least take my own dummy wallet out and give it to the mugger in exchange for leaving everyone alone. It has about $20 and a bunch of used up American Express gift cards in it.
Tehnix|11 years ago
For me to risk my life for you, I would have to know you somewhat well, and then I would very likely intervene.
It's not only the bystander effect, but also the quite rational question "do I want to risk my own life for the sake of this woman I don't know, in this situation I know very little about?"
Once, my friend intervened in two drunk girls fighting each other. He was calm, but instead they just turned against him.
It's simply a game of pros and cons, and I can very much follow the community thing that Anderkent mentions in another thread.
netcan|11 years ago
One is diffusion of responsibility or bystander effects, which I think she's hinting at. In a crowd an individual is less likely to take action. I think this has a lot to do with our social instincts. Being in a crowd of strangers is a new thing. We aren't built for it.
On our own, we make decisions for ourselves. That's easy. A group is supposed to be a family or troop or somesuch. These will usually have a leader. Someone responsible for deciding that this is a mugging, that we're on the victim's side and that we are going to join the fight. I'm not sure it has to be a literal leader, but there needs to be a pre-established decision making process and the individual needs to know where they stand in it.
A second issue is that this is not really a question of "willingness to help" in the intellectual sense. It's a question of instinct.
A third is that in a city (or in modern life in general) we are surrounded by other people's problems. The homeless person we step over, the domestic violence sounds we don't call the cops on, the volunteer help line where we don't volunteer at and the charity we don't contribute to.
This is complicated. I think it's more about living in cities, nations and the global village than it is about iphones.
Theodores|11 years ago
If you have a dog with an injured paw then different people will willingly help you (dog lovers) than those people that will willingly help you find a lost cat (cat lovers). Same with directions, some random tourist might not be as willing to help you with directions as a native, the tourist could probably get the maps out on their phone, but they will not feel as if that is the thing to do. However, if you were lost in their home town then they might walk you to where you needed to go.
As a cyclist I often help other cyclists with flat tyres etc. and you try stopping me from helping out. I spent a decade working in the cycle trade so, for me, fixing someone else's bike is merely an opportunity to keep my skills fresh. I cannot say that first aid is my thing, however, I am sure that someone else will keep the patient warm until the authorities arrive, so I auto-delegate myself to warning traffic and collecting debris from the road in such circumstances. Because I don't do cars, I am unlikely to offer to bump start someone's car or help them back in if they have locked their keys inside. However, others that have those skills will take up the opportunity to help.
When it comes to violent confrontational circumstances, there was a time when I would have a go, however, after getting my head kicked in by four muggers I no longer feel inclined to get involved. However, I do have friends that have been doormen and they will leap to the opportunity to do a little bit of enforcing - it is in their skill set.
Most people are willing and able to help out if they can and if they have confidence in their usefulness in a given situation. The problem is that when there is some rare and outrageous act of violence going on that there are very few people around who have 'enforcing' in their skill set. Hence the apparent 'bystander effect'.
endgame|11 years ago
owenwil|11 years ago
Luckily, Google's cache has a copy already:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:m0OtEZT...
IanDrake|11 years ago
Another thing to consider is getting a gun or at least supporting gun rights. Not a lot of unarmed people are going to help you against a crazy person with a knife. If someone was caring a gun, they could have helped. If she were caring, then she could have put an end to this nightmare herself.
There's a saying in the gun rights community, "The second you need a cop, they're always minutes away." All the cops I know agree with that statement. It's not a reflection on them, just that they can't be everywhere all the time.
I hope her injuries (both physical and mental) heal quickly.
kagebe|11 years ago
No, that is not how it would work out in most (if not all) cases. Especially not in such a public place. And especially not if the gun was contained in something, e.g. her purse.
Even if that person were a great shot, in a (even moderately) close combat fight with a knife-wielder, she would most likely not be able to pull/unlock the gun before being stabbed, or miss and/or hit others or just be plain too scared/untrained to keep that much control.
Even if it worked, there would be the question of ethics and legality of wounding/killing another person to save her possessions. The legality may not be an issue in (many states in) the US, but even there not always a clear case and most likely will have some legal procedure.
If she were able to use the gun for intimidation and get the assailant to run away, that might work, but the attacker is obviously beyond quite some normal mental restrictions when threatening to kill her in a public place and might not easily be deterred.
Guns are the perfect tool for killing people when you know you want/plan to kill people. They are effective in wounding too, if you're able to hit where it doesn't kill. They are mostly useless in not getting wounded/killed by someone who wants to wound/kill you.
ThePhysicist|11 years ago
I think part of the explanation is that such situations occur pretty rarely in the developed world, so people do not know what's the appropriate reaction: Fight back and risk getting attacked as well, scream for help, just call the police? It probably can be compared to first-aid situations, where most people seem to get completely paralyzed and are unable to help the injured person. Maybe governments should offer seminars where people learn to react properly in such situations, just like in the first-aid seminars that you're required to attend when you get your driving license.
simoncion|11 years ago
Where do you live that you're required to take a first-aid class before you get your driver's license? That sounds like a freaking fantastic idea!
jaksmit|11 years ago
davb|11 years ago
We seen people throw themselves in front of cars then demand cash from the driver, destroy restrooms in fast food joints, and just sit the street talking incoherently to themselves. We were there for less than a week.
I wondered if perhaps while we've not been great at reducing homelessness here, we have better support for those with acute mental illness.
I know every large city has its problems, and I absolutely loved visiting SF (I'd go back in a heartbeat), but seeing this just made me sad.
mareofnight|11 years ago
I've had this habit for about a year. So far, called the police too late to do anything about it twice (once because my phone was dead, once from a combination of negligence and not knowing the right number to call), and once called the emergency number for a guy who fainted in public (but ran off before help could arrive). In the last case, a handful of other bystanders also stopped to help the guy, so bystander effect mysteriously didn't work that day. So I haven't been terribly helpful to anyone, but I was surprised how often I saw problems once I was looking for it.
(I don't think I would have been terribly helpful in this situation, though - I don't know how to break up a fight without being hurt, and probably wouldn't have thought of some of the better ideas like trying to single out a strong-looking person in the crowd and get them to help.)
lazyjones|11 years ago
I've lived in different countries and have seen different reactions where people are used to feeling responsible for their peers because they know the government doesn't care, is not efficient, or otherwise limited.
Of course, some people will also be reluctant to get stabbed for a complete stranger.
unknown|11 years ago
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blueskin_|11 years ago
treyfitty|11 years ago
lectrick|11 years ago
chrismonsanto|11 years ago
tomp|11 years ago
lnanek2|11 years ago
I admit I never would have helped besides maybe removing myself from the scene and calling authorities because the chances are high I'd be charged with assault myself, hurt, detained by police, etc.. Once you get an arrest you are effectively impossible to hire for most companies the rest of your life.
bsg75|11 years ago
This is an example of the real world. Its nothing new, nor likely to change. History is full of "bad things" happening to people, on a large and small scale, that happened because others did nothing to stop it.
My comment does not mean that people should not help others who are in need, but suggesting this is something new - possibly due to changes in technology - reinforces the (wrong) idea that people think the world is a safe place.
aaron695|11 years ago
OP also didn't react as hindsight tells us the answer. Hand it over. Why did they value something crappy like money over their life, are they so superficial? (Probably not)
We've been told a million times just to hand it over, but OP still didn't.
Concentrate on the long term issues, there are more and they are solvable through logic, like solving homelessness.
Don't worry so much about how people react in unexpected situations. Worry more about peoples long term decision making, that scares me.
crashoverdrive|11 years ago
I had the largest presentation of my life that night for a public audience of 200 people and letting my company and CTO down. I couldn't imagine losing all of my things and not being able to do so. Yes it was a very selfish driver at the time, but my brain couldn't move beyond that thought.
6d0debc071|11 years ago
1) Believe that your intervention will do good/be effective.
2) Have a personal relationship with the victim.
3) Be thinking of the victim as a person rather than a piece of the scenery.
4) Perceive the risk to self (legal/physical) to be low.
5) Don't believe someone else will do it.
6) Don't believe that it's a setup where the 'victim' will turn on you.
I'm not saying those are the things that matter, they're just the things that came to mind.
And how many of them typically apply?
This was a knife attack, and that probably takes care of 1 and 4. I've seen untrained people fighting in the street, and it's the equivalent of a monkey slinging shit. Add to that that a knife is less to do with careful application of skill - it's more constant. It's entirely possible, if people had intervened, we'd be talking about multiple people seriously injured, perhaps scarred for life, or killed.
2 doesn't apply, 3 could go either way, 5 might be the case - there were a lot of people there. 6, happens, but again might go either way.
...
And there's a thought - did they see the knife? or did they just see two people having a domestic and screaming at each other? I imagine that might decrease the chances of anything happening.
instanttaylor|11 years ago
There was a group of about 12-15 high school age girls and 10 of them were just watching 3 or 4 of them gang up on 1 of them.
WTF do I do here? I had the same thought process as many people in this thread. I could get involved, but realistically, there's absolutely no way I'm going to go try to break up a fight with that many people in it, let alone teenage girls.
I watched for about 5 seconds before I started to get my phone out to call the cops (which I also felt bad about b/c... wtf are they going to do... something needs to happen now).
Luckily for the kid, she managed to get away and they stopped pursuing her. But man, the feeling of helplessness sucked pretty hard.
peterwwillis|11 years ago
Really? Have you SEEN the homeless population there? Who the fuck is helping them?
> But what the hell was that? I’ve read all the psychology books. I know the typical explanations.
....then why are you asking? It's bystander effect, plain and simple. If you're expecting San Franciscans to go against human nature just because they write code, sorry, ain't gonna happen.
Get some pepper spray and some self defense classes and learn to fight dirty. Don't blame other people for not saving you; they have no obligation to.
> Is this how disconnected from the real world we’ve become?
It's how disconnected the author has become. I'm glad she's now got perspective on how the real world works. (I'm also glad she came out of that safe and sound; sounds like a really scary fucked up situation)
bsaul|11 years ago
I tried an experiment once quite recently on a train trip, to try and ask some young hysterical girl to calm herself down ( she was basically insulting everybody). What happend was this : seing that someone did something made the other passengers decided to act and speak their mind as well. The problem is that some guy decided to go physical on her and hit her on the face. I had to ask for help stopping him this time.
My conclusion was that :
1/ it only takes one person to make all the other personn move as well.
2/ you have to be really carefull because depending on the level of anger of the crowd, things can get extremely violent.
joshstrange|11 years ago
There is no way I would have intervened. I am a male and I can't see my involvement in the situation working out for me at all. Now you might say I'm wrong for putting my self-preservation above that on Kristen's but this isn't just about preventing physical harm to myself. In fact if I knew that I would only be cut (non-fatal) then I wouldn't have this stance. Instead I am worried about the ramifications of "attacking" a women in public like this.
We have seen countless times in the media where someone coming to the aid of someone in danger (not in an attack situation) has been sued for helping (just google "rescuer sued"). So if trying to help someone alone can get you screwed just think about what can happen when there are two people involved. What assurances do I have that I won't inadvertently hurt Kristen in the process and that she won't decide to sue me? Or that the attacker in this situation won't sue me for "attacking her" while trying to prevent her from stabbing Kristen (google "attacker sues victim")? I'll tell you: NONE. For all we know the attacker will sue Kristen for throwing hot coffee on her, this story isn't over yet.
Let's examine an example:
I intervene, I kick the attacker in the head to get her off Kristen. Let's ignore for now the chance that a bystander only see's me kick this women in the head and assumes it was unprovoked and then attacks me. Then Kristen gets up, shakily thanks me and the disappears into the crowd. I am left standing over the body of a women that I just physically assaulted. A bystander had pulled out their phone to film what was happening but only caught me kicking the women. If I leave the scene then there is a chance I will be hunted down and if I stay at the very least I am going to spend the rest of the day at the police station. The attacker stuffers brain damage from the kick and the family sues me for all I'm worth and I spend the rest of my life paying off the debt while waking up daily to the thought of "No good deed...".
I understand this is a worst case outcome but there is no way in hell I am going to risk my life AND if I survive the remainder of my life over a $600 phone and the contents of her bag, it simply is not worth it. I'd cover those costs with my first meeting with an attorney. If the attacker was actually stabbing Kristen then it would be a different story but that's not what happened. I've talked to people trained in various martial arts and the vast majority of them say that if they were mugged they would hand over their belongings. Mind you these are people trained to fight (whereas I can assure you I have no such training) but they know their lives are not worth their possessions.
TL;DR: A phone and purse are not worth the victims or a potential rescuers life (both immediate and long term)
rrss1122|11 years ago
dTal|11 years ago
"suddenly we were brawling, she swinging at me with a knife in one hand"
"I felt blood flowing down my face. 'SOMEBODY HELP ME!' People stare and watch."
"Please, she’s got a knife, she’s trying to stab me, please! ANYONE!"
Seems to me that it was pretty clear that actual knife attacking was taking place. She's got blood streaming down her face crying blue murder about a girl with a knife - you wouldn't help because she hadn't actually been stabbed yet?
How would you live with yourself?
sreyaNotfilc|11 years ago
Posted this in her reply... 'Nuff said...
ArjenM|11 years ago
Plus people are sheep, if not a single person is crazy enough to start and help someone else, then most of the time nobody will.
fallinghawks|11 years ago
It's just getting that first person.
ccvannorman|11 years ago
Just in case some of you here were losing faith in bystanders worldwide. ;-]
littletimo|11 years ago
rusabd|11 years ago
simonebrunozzi|11 years ago
afarrell|11 years ago
fallinghawks|11 years ago
ChrisArchitect|11 years ago
CocaKoala|11 years ago
hollerith|11 years ago
_cipher_|11 years ago
lectrick|11 years ago
It is a "bystander intervention" and "diffusion of responsibility" human-psychology problem. Both of those are Googleable terms and both have practical solutions in how to bypass them; unfortunately, typically only people who've taken some Psych coursework are aware of them.
Compounding this is the fact that there are MANY crazy homeless people in San Francisco, so you tend to automatically filter unusual behavior out.
hirre|11 years ago
crashoverdrive|11 years ago
orkoden|11 years ago
greatsuccess|11 years ago
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gametheoretic|11 years ago
dan_bk|11 years ago
IanDrake|11 years ago
It's our bill of rights that prevents us from forcing help on these people and, while it's sad for them, I rather like our strict policy on NOT being able to just call someone crazy and force them into an institution.
huehue|11 years ago
blueskin_|11 years ago
icebraining|11 years ago