Why attack on city bus met inaction

By Abigail Goldman

Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 | 2 a.m.

It looks like they’re having fun. Five young men, riding a city bus down Las Vegas Boulevard, taking turns punching another passenger out of his wallet. In some frames of the surveillance video, their faces are frozen in roller coaster free-fall thrill, smiling as sweetly as swampland salesmen. In other frames, they’re throwing fits of fists, then shoving, then smiling again.

Several passengers watched the robbery happen. Not one intervened.

It’s a predictable outcome that illustrates a dark truth: The more people who witness a crime, the less likely any of them will help the victim.

You probably wouldn’t have lifted a finger either, by the way. At least that’s what the research suggests. Sorry to deflate that dreamy hero hallucination.

What did and didn’t happen on that CAT bus just after midnight July 26 is most comfortably dissected through the lens of certain psychological phenomena. First you have what’s called “diffusion of responsibility” — when multiple people observe a crime, individual witnesses assume someone else in the crowd will intervene. It’s a division of apathy: More people mean less individual responsibility.

The most famous example of diffusion of responsibility is also the oldest. The name Kitty Genovese will be familiar to psychology students who read the chapter in their textbooks about the Queens woman’s murder in 1964, which occurred over a 30-minute period and was heard by a number of people. The New York Times initially reported the assault was observed by 38 people, none of whom called police. Though the number was ultimately disproved and there were later reports that police were called but didn’t respond promptly, the murder’s powerful impact in the world of social psychology remains. Diffusion of responsibility is also called the bystander effect, and is sometimes referred to as Genovese syndrome.

John Darley, a professor of psychology at Princeton, was the first to publish a study on the bystander effect in a laboratory setting. He put college students through tests in the early 1960s that would never fly today — in one experiment, he had study subjects fill out surveys in rooms that slowly filled with smoke. In another, he watched what subjects did when they heard a woman screaming for help in an adjoining room. In a third, he watched what happened when a person talking over an intercom suddenly hears his conversation partner choke and call for help.

In each circumstance, Darley waited to see how long it would take subjects to alert researchers of the problem. They found the time it took for people to speak up was influenced by the number of people they thought were participating in the study with them. In some cases, people never said a word.

So, when Darley watches the video of the bus robbery, he isn’t shocked or surprised or particularly disturbed. First of all, it cannot be discounted that intervening when violence is in progress is a tough sell, something that would scare anybody. This is compounded by the fact that if nobody intervenes, it can almost normalize the violence and make it seem as if nobody really needs to get involved.

“There’s a tendency for people to interpret other people’s lack of response as indicating no response is needed,” Darley said.

This is called “pluralistic ignorance” — if nobody else is helping, the help must not be needed. They must know something I don’t.

Kitty Genovese was killed over a relatively long period of time, but the bus incident couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes, not much time, Darley says, to figure out a course of action, particularly if nobody on the bus looks too worried. (And nobody does. One witness appears to be laughing, but that’s another conversation.)

One of the five suspects grabbed the victim’s wallet while he was trying to get out of the bus, and police don’t know whether the driver waited for the assault to end or simply kept on driving as if nothing were wrong. If the driver kept driving, if the bus authority ignored the assault, it’s even easier to see how passengers might assume they need not intervene, Darley said.

Some studies suggest that people who empathize with victims are more likely to intervene. Study subjects who, say, have a brief conversation with a person they later see victimized are more likely to speak up, and sooner, Darley said.

The bus incident illustrates a behavior we morally condemn (particularly people who weren’t on the bus, who insist they would have jumped in with aid). But study subjects in Darley’s lab who were shown how they were influenced by the crowd, “nice brave college students” who had the bystander phenomenon spelled out for them, were more likely to intervene later. And this speaks to an altogether more agreeable human trait — the ability to learn from mistakes.

At some point, the five suspects walked off the bus into the dark. Police posted the surveillance video on Facebook and MySpace, asking people, “Do You Recognize These Teens?”

As of Wednesday evening, nobody had come forward.