Julia Shaw

And so this case was often taken as this

Almost example of look how terrible human beings are.

We just walk by.

We don't care about what's happening to strangers on the streets.

And actually what's happened since is that there's been lots of other bystander experiments and they have not substantiated this.

So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going how horrible that this happened to this one person.

And it is.

But that doesn't mean that that's always how it happens.

And so actually what we find in bystander research is that most of the time bystanders do intervene.

It's just when there has already been a crowd that has accumulated, you read the room and you assume, well, nobody else has intervened yet.

And so it must not be a real problem.

That desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders intervention.

I mean, that's why we look at heroes, people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers.

We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets.

And that's because we recognize that we might not be capable of that.

If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them?

I think that's a big question mark.

And so when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it.

That is something that is a really admirable quality and that we as humans do celebrate and we should.

And I think often we should celebrate those incidents more and not the bystander moments where we didn't intervene.