What Bystanders Do When They Witness Violence
November 2, 2009
Prompted by the recent gang rape of a 15-year-old girl in California, NPR news program Talk of the Nation produced a story called, “What Bystanders Do When They Witness Violence.” For this program, host Neal Conan interviewed crime reporter Kurt Fischer, Harvard psychology professor Mahzarin Banaji, and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh. You can listen to this program or read a transcript of the show here. While the beginning of the program focuses on this tragic event in California, most of the program is concerned with more general questions related to the “bystander effect” and the conditions under which people are more likely to take action when witnessing violence or injustice.
Discussion Questions:
- What is a bystander? Identify a situation when you acted as a bystander. What factors influenced your decision to “stand by”? Identify a moment from history when people acted as bystanders. What do you think influenced their decision to do nothing in the face of injustice?
- Describing experiments on bystander behavior, Professor Banaji said, “The data show over and over again that if there was one person in the room, the likelihood of helping is around 75 percent. But as the number goes to two and three and four and five and six, the number of people who jump up to help drops to 10 percent.” How do you make sense of these findings? Why do you think people are less likely to help when they are part of a crowd? How does this finding correspond to your own experience?
- One common reaction to hearing the story of the gang-rape is for people to view the bystanders as “monsters” because they watched a violent act without doing anything to stop it. Professor Banaji argues against this assessment when she says, “These are not monsters. These are us. This is all of us.” What do you think she means by this? Do you agree that under certain circumstances we all have the capacity to act as bystanders? Why or why not?
- Studies have shown that the greater the number of people present, the less likely they are to intervene to stop violence; this is often referred to as the “bystander effect.” To prevent or minimize the “bystander effect,” Banaji alludes to the role of education. She says, “If we [are] not better educated about this particular effect and what it does to us, we may fall prey to it ourselves.” What can be done to educate people about the “bystander effect”? Do you think education can make a difference? Why or why not? What else can be done to encourage people to take action when they witness violence and injustice?
- Professor Banaji concludes the interview by saying, “If there's anything for us to do here, it is to learn as individuals, to practice small acts of intervention, to just sort of begin to think about events around us as our responsibility.” What does it mean to “practice small acts of intervention”? Identify examples of what this might look like. What can be done to encourage people to do this?
- What responsibility or guilt do bystanders bear when they witness horrible crimes but fail to intervene? Under what circumstances, if any, is it appropriate NOT to take action when witnessing violence and injustice? Under what circumstances, if any, are people morally obligated to take action to stop violence and injustice?
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