Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  Quite simply, there is little extraordinary about the Liverpool 38. They’re men and women, young and old—a fairly representative cross section of a fairly unremarkable community. Reading their testimony, their reactions to what they saw start to sound reasonable. You can understand why someone would have assumed the children were brothers walking home—too young to have been left on their own, sure, but not in any immediate danger requiring intervention.

  If we permit ourselves, their testimony conjures up memories of times when we, too, have been less than proactive in investigating the true nature of events going on around us. Like the loud argument that we assumed was a private domestic squabble under control. Or the disoriented man on the park bench about whose fate no one else seemed the least bit concerned. Maybe, as we suspected, those weren’t emergencies. But maybe they were.

  At the playground with my daughters not long ago, I sat passively while a ten-year-old jumped repeatedly from the top of a fifteen-foot climbing structure. He emerged unscathed, even if his inability to stick the landing on dismount would have cost him points with the Romanian judge. The whole endeavor looked unnecessarily dangerous to me, but who was I to interfere? His parents were somewhere nearby, I figured.

  To be honest, I can easily imagine myself as one of the Liverpool 38, walking by James Bulger and his abductors without getting involved in their lives. Can’t you?

  THE “LIVERPOOL 38” was more than a catchy nickname; the sobriquet was also reassuring. It grouped these witnesses into a single, apathetic collective, confining them to a particular locale and a finite quantity. We didn’t fail James that day—rather, it was a fixed number of people from a specific town in England. The name conjures up the image of three dozen broken souls slinking off en masse to an outpost where they can live out their lives in ignominy.

  But we’ve seen that there was little remarkable about these individuals. And further investigation reveals that their inaction was hardly a uniquely Liverpudlian response. That is, for the Liverpool 38 to remain the paragon of apathy, their dubious performance needs to stand out as a glaring aberration of time and place.

  It doesn’t.

  Early one morning in October 2007, Constable Christopher Worden of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was on patrol in a small town in the Northwest Territories. Upon observing suspicious behavior, Worden called out to three men, two of whom were already seated in the back of a taxi. The third man, standing outside, panicked and ran into the woods. Worden chased after him on foot. Seconds later, gunshots rang out.

  Three women in front of a house nearby told police that they saw the officer run into the woods, heard shots, and did not see anyone come back out. A man asleep inside an adjacent building was awakened by gunfire and scrambled to his window to catch a glimpse of a civilian fleeing the area. The taxi driver, too, saw the chase unfold, assumed that the shots came from the officer’s gun, then decided to go ahead and drive his remaining passengers to their destination elsewhere. All told, at least seven people heard shots and saw parts of the chase. Not one of them called the police. Two hours later—only after the dispatcher became concerned that Worden wasn’t answering his radio—a fellow officer found him bleeding in the woods. He died later that night.

  A year earlier, in West Melbourne, Australia, thirty-five-year-old computer store employee Juan Zhang was reported missing by her fiancé. Zhang had left a retail location earlier that evening to follow her nightly routine of driving to the regional office to deliver cash earnings—a total of $9,000 on the day in question. She never arrived. The next morning, police found Zhang’s eyeglasses in a pool of blood in the staff parking lot behind the store. Days later, her body was found across town in the trunk of her car.

  Investigators determined that a coworker had waited for Zhang in the parking lot so he could rob her. She resisted, resulting in more than sixty defensive stab wounds: twenty-two to her hands, ten to her neck, and thirty-four to her head. Zhang’s killer confirmed that she had put up a lengthy struggle, including repeated cries for help. In fact, he confessed to throwing her in the trunk and driving to a side street to wait for her screams to stop before going home to clean up. Police located at least eight witnesses who heard “blood-curdling” screams from the parking lot. Not one so much as picked up the phone while Zhang bled to death in the trunk of her own car.

  It is true that, unlike the Liverpool 38, the bystanders in these cases witnessed an ongoing violent confrontation. They might have feared for their own safety, and that shock could have short-circuited any natural inclination to get involved. But just as real-life bystander inaction isn’t confined to a particular nation of origin, it also extends beyond the realm of violent crime. Consider Eric Steel’s 2006 documentary The Bridge, which examines suicides at San Francisco’s Golden Gate. Shot on location throughout 2004, the film depicts nearly two dozen different suicides. Some are shown in long focus, where a barely visible splash is the only indication that you’ve just witnessed an actual death. Others are shown via close-up, with the audience given an uncomfortably intimate glimpse into the last tormented moments of another person’s life.

  Part of what makes the film so jarring (and what enabled its creation in the first place) is that the suicides occur in public, in the midst of tourists, bikers, and commuters. The close-ups create a surreal juxtaposition of one individual’s death with the mundane routine of everyone else on the bridge. Kevin Hines, one of the lucky 2 percent to have survived his jump, describes the intersection of these two worlds. A depressed nineteen-year-old at the time, he spent forty minutes on the bridge before jumping. “Crying my eyes out” as hundreds of people walked by, he found it odd that no one thought to check on him, given his obvious distress in a popular suicide spot.

  Finally, a passerby stopped. She wanted him to take her picture.

  In the film, Hines describes his thoughts at that moment: “Wow, I’m going to kill myself. What is wrong with you? Can’t you see the tears pouring down my face? But she couldn’t. She was on her own hype.”

  Hines snapped the photo, as requested. Then he returned the camera, climbed to the top of the railing, and jumped.

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  Crowds inhibit helping, leading to the counterintuitive conclusion that you may be better off running out of gas on a lightly traveled road than on a busy highway. In the latter case, the hundreds of other cars around give each motorist a good excuse to drive right by. The lone driver encountering your stopped car on a quiet side street enjoys no such luxury. Thus, location makes a big difference when it comes to getting help.

  It might be tempting, therefore, to pigeonhole bystander apathy as a uniquely urban phenomenon—a problem that rears its ugly head on city streets, on crowded bridges, and in busy shopping centers but not elsewhere. Indeed, when researchers visited thirty-six U.S. cities to assess where people were most likely to help pick up dropped items or assist a blind pedestrian across the street, they observed less help the more densely populated a location was.10 Planning an old-fashioned American cross-country road trip? Try to squeeze the car problems into the middle portions of the journey, because it’s easier to find help in Chattanooga and Kansas City than in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

  One explanation for this finding is that having more people around translates into more opportunities for seeing emergencies as nonur-gent and relinquishing responsibility to others. There’s also a more basic perceptual process at play: cities are cognitively demanding. For a moment, forget about failing to interpret events as emergencies or shirking responsibility—in crowded settings we’re just less tuned in to everything around us.

  There’s so much going on in the city: masses of people, honking car horns, flashing lights, kamikaze taxi drivers, peculiar odors of uncertain origin, and then some. Perceptually, it’s impossible and inadvisable to take it all in. Faced with sensory overload, urbanites have to prioritize by determining what must be attended to and what can be ignored. The experienced c
ity dweller adapts by developing sensory blinders, focusing on the immediate goal at hand and blocking out everything else.

  This urban tunnel vision allows for efficient navigation of city life, but it brings with it side effects. For one, it comes at the expense of attention span and memory, such that a walk through a park or nature reserve actually has been found to have restorative qualities for cognitive functioning. In a recent study at the University of Michigan, respondents completed a task that required them to repeat a series of number sequences in backward order. 11 Individuals who had just walked through an arboretum performed better than did those who had just walked down a busy urban street and, presumably, still had their figurative blinders on.

  Another side effect of cities is that people become less likely to notice others in need of help. City University of New York psychologist Stanley Milgram—about whom you’ll read much more later, and whose research may very well constitute the most famous scientific demonstrations of the power of situations—described this urban sensory process as follows: “There are practical limitations to the Samaritan impulse in a major city. If a citizen attended to every needy person, if he were sensitive to and acted on every altruistic impulse that was evoked in the city, he could scarcely keep his own affairs in order.”12

  But I also must warn you against reading too much into these conclusions about cities. Understanding helping isn’t the same as investing in real estate—it’s not only location, location, location. Consider, once again, the refrain that New Yorkers are chronically unhelpful. To the contrary, I, for one, have had many helpful suggestions yelled at me while trying to read street maps in busy Manhattan crosswalks. And though most are either unfit for publication or anatomically impossible, one—offered while a friend and I were having what we believed to be a private conversation about lunch plans—led me to find my favorite bagel place in the city, at Fifty-first and Third.

  So there.

  And keep in mind that the examples on the previous pages came from all over the map: England, Canada, Australia, and California. The potential for inaction knows no geographic or cultural boundary. For every story about urbanites who fail to come to the aid of one of their own, there’s a comparable tale like Constable Worden’s, the Mountie left bleeding in the woods in a town of four thousand. For every report of dead subway riders, there’s the New Yorker who risks his life to save a child who’s fallen on the same set of tracks. Locations influence our thoughts and actions, but they do not define us.

  Well, then, can we at least reconcile bystander inaction as the product of a specific time period? The examples I have cited occurred in the past two decades, in an era when technology has shrunk the figurative distance between communities but has also made it easier than ever to disengage from the outside world. In today’s waiting rooms, elevators, and commuter trains, you see more pairs of headphones than conversation partners, more people thumbing iPhones than making eye contact. Maybe our hyper-technological culture produced the Liverpool 38 and its progeny? Would a return to the more communal days of yore rekindle concern for our fellow citizens?

  Alas, bystander inaction is no more easily confined to era than to culture or region. Probably its most notorious example occurred almost fifty years ago, in front of an apartment building in Queens, New York. Just after three o’clock that March morning in 1964, an assailant grabbed Catherine “Kitty” Genovese from behind and stabbed her before fleeing. Genovese screamed for help and staggered toward her apartment. Unable to make it, she entered a different building and collapsed in the lobby. Ten minutes later, emboldened by the lack of a police response, her assailant returned and continued his attack for another half hour. Not until 3:50 did police arrive, having been summoned, finally, by a concerned neighbor at least thirty-five minutes after the attack began.

  Genovese died en route to the hospital. The New York Times article about her murder opened as follows: “For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks.” That’s right, by the wonder of numerical coincidence, Liverpool wasn’t the first city to boast a notoriously apathetic collective of thirty-eight.

  It turns out that much of the reporting on the murder, including the original Times piece, was somewhat misleading.13 Investigators actually located only a dozen witnesses who admitted hearing or seeing part of the attack, and few if any observed the entire incident. It wasn’t true, as the article implied, that thirty-eight neighbors stood silently at their windows for half an hour, leering as if watching a slasher film. Several had no idea a crime was under way; apparently, it was not unusual to hear early-morning commotion on the streets below, given their proximity to several bars. Many of the witnesses gave rational if naïve explanations for their failure to intervene, just as their British contemporaries would nearly thirty years later.

  Though reports on Genovese’s murder quickly devolved into more exaggerated parable than historical documentation, the well-known incident still demonstrates that the inaction of bystanders transcends community, continent, and era. The Liverpool 38 was no aberration of personality, no tragic fluke of time and place.

  LESSONS LEARNED

  The situational influences on helping are varied in number and nature. Many revolve around being in a crowd, an experience that informs our sensory perception, relieves feelings of responsibility, and ups the stakes for the action we take. Crowds make us less likely to realize there’s an emergency. Moreover, trying to rouse the semiconscious subway passenger or intervening in a couple’s loud, but intimate argument always carries risks, but doing so in front of an audience adds the threat of public embarrassment. Inaction is usually the safest bet.

  This very notion that there’s something approaching a cost/benefit analysis underlying decisions to help is unpalatable to many. And the more general conclusion regarding the context dependence of helping can seem disconcerting as well. We prefer our morality as we do the daily newspaper—in black and white, and not teetering on bankruptcy. But the modern reality is more challenging for both halves of the analogy.

  This realization presents an opportunity more so than a rude awakening, however. Understanding that helping isn’t just about personality opens new doors in the effort to combat apathy. I’m not alluding to anything as formal as legislation—in the wake of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, you may recall the upsurge in interest regarding “Good Samaritan” laws among politicians as well as sitcom writers. 14 But many European countries, including France where the crash occurred, already had on the books at the time of Diana’s death a legal duty to rescue in the case of emergencies.

  Rather, I’m talking about the more individualized epiphanies experienced when we learn about our tendencies for nonintervention. Consider the following e-mail from one of my students:Not 20 minutes after the end of your lecture today, I witness someone’s food fall over at [dining hall] & I felt so bad for her. I thought to myself, what would Professor Sommers do?! Haha, but really, after that lecture there was no way I could not help her. I brought her a new cover for her food & I was even willing to help her clean up (even though as a vegetarian I’m kind of uncomfortable touching food with meat).

  Or, on the more severe end of the continuum, another e-mail from a former student:you probably don’t remember me, but i took your class 4 years ago. i have a story for you. late last night, around 2:00 am, i’m driving home and the car in front of me starts to swerve off the road. i figured he’s pulling over to sleep or go to the bathroom or whatever, but after i passed, i started thinking about what we learned about people driving by emergencies. so i turned around . . . the guy didn’t look good. when i knocked on the window he didn’t move, so i called 911. they wound up taking him away in an ambulance . . . honestly, i haven’t thought about any of my college classes in a while (no offense ☺), but i just couldn’t keep driving when i realized i was doing the exact same thing we read about.

  Learning about the
true influences on human nature can be a life-changing experience. The impact of situations usually hides right in front of you, so once your attention is drawn to it, it’s hard to revert to old habits. Whether or not my students expected it, their newfound understanding of apathy and helping stuck with them and influenced how they saw the world from that point forward.

  That’ll teach Sleepy Guy to doze through my lectures.

  I’ve had similar epiphanies, though admittedly on a less dramatic scale than witnessing a car wreck. Much to my wife’s chagrin, I no longer sit patiently when the film goes out of focus; I jump up to report it, then run back to my seat so as not to miss too much of the movie. And much to my wife’s amusement, I insist on calling city hall when the light overhanging our densely populated street burns out. I’m not trying to win a merit badge for citizenship—I’ve just learned too much to assume that anyone else is going to notice, much less report these problems. These days, I have a hard time letting the pressure to act diffuse to others, even with a crowd around. After reading this chapter, I hope you will, too.

  So lest anyone suggest that this situational analysis is a misguided effort to excuse those who fail to help, remember my students’ e-mails. This chapter’s objective has not been to exonerate the passive bystander, but rather to better understand what leads all of us to exhibit indifference and inaction. Through this investigation, we gain a deeper understanding of human nature, yes, but we also disabuse ourselves of the naïveté and mistaken assumptions that contribute to the inertia of inaction in the first place. The more we understand about the situational obstacles to helping, the better we’re able to avoid them; knowing about bystander apathy makes mindless passivity less likely.