Interrupting Violence

Many people believe that the more people who are present when a violent crime is taking place, the more likely that a person being victimized will be helped. However, research shows that in public we are less likely to help another person in an emergency or threatening situation. This human behavior has been called the bystander effect (Darley & Latané, 1968). In the news and online, we see videos from eyewitnesses who captured threatening or violent circumstances, offering lots of opportunity to study human behavior in these situations.

Sometimes these videos capture people intervening, regardless of their training or knowledge of how to diffuse what’s happening. Other times we watch as the event unfolds while the person behind the lens stands by. The bystander effect also happens in the absence of a threat. When other people are present, we are generally less likely to help others–even to pick up dropped change or hold a door.

Our default response to do nothing comes from a complex interaction of fight-or-flight response, social norms, and external facilitators and barriers to action. Our brains receive more information than they can process at one time, so all people have a natural tendency to conserve cognition resources (Cleveland, 45). One of the ways our brain does this is by categorizing. Our brains categorize people into social groups and rely on information about that group to help us interact and predict behavior (Cleveland, 47). This might start as simply descriptive, but without exposure to people different from ourselves we begin to think more extremely and make value judgements about others (Cleveland, 27). This is just one of the many cognitive activities happening behind the scenes. 

But the bystander effect can be interrupted, and all of us can play a role. While we cannot fully prevent every situation, interference or stepping in when something doesn’t look right can reduce harm. Forty years of research on the bystander effect tells us that people can influence us to do nothing in violent situations–but it also tells us that the bystander effect can be reversed (Fischer et al., 2011). When a group is held together by a shared, valued identity or experiences, the group can promote beneficence rather than undermine helping behavior (Levine & Crowther, 2008).