[Thor]

We keep seeing these acts occur and since about the 60's there's been scientists studying what is going on when a group stands by while harm is being done. The case that really started all this was Kitty Ginovese:



Its gone by names such as bystander non-intervention effect, bystander effect and is something that evolutionary biologist/psychologists have been trying to match with evolutionary altruism which we see; this obviously being quite a dramatic opposition to that idea.

The recent events in the US of the 15yr old girl being gang raped by her school with multiple witnesses was again showing us this horrible thing happening again, some good quotes from a NPR show on this girls brutal attack/rape:

Sometimes it's easy to think about helping an individual person, even though a group tragedy may not affect us. And again, the bystander problem poses a dilemma because this is about an individual human being and that person's suffering. And so, of course, there are now, we know, many, many experiments done on something called the bystander non-intervention effect, and it was done in the late �60s, following the murder of Kitty Genovese. And exactly as you say, Neal, the initial response from psychiatrists and psychologists was: Who were these horrible people who stood around watching the murder of this woman and didn't call the police? And that led to a stunning set of experiments.

And the reason I say that the experiments here are so important is that because in any given case, we don't know exactly what the pressures on the situation were, and we don't know exactly what those folks experienced. And that's why when we bring complex phenomena like this into the laboratory and we put them to the test there, we can say with far greater precision what it is that's going on. And the results of two psychologists by the name of Latane and Darley stand out here because they re-enacted certain situations in the laboratory: a person having a seizure; a bunch of smoke just flowing into a room. And all they varied was the number of people present.

And 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, right?
So there's something about the size of the group that, although it should lead us to be more likely to help, actually produces the counter intuitive reverse effect.

CONAN: That's fascinating. So in effect, there's something biological going on here.

Prof. BANAJI: Well, we can - you know, we would want to at least say that it is something cognitive going on because here's what we think needs to happen in an emergency situation like this. First of all, you have to notice that there is an emergency.
CONAN: Sure.

Prof. BANAJI: And the remarkable result from these original studies is that if you are with other people sitting there, you are less likely to even notice the smoke. You are less likely to even recognize that the child's cry for help is a real cry for help, and so on. So there's something that changes in our minds to even identify what it is that's going on. And, of course, once we identify what it is that's going on, then we need to figure out some way to take action, and that's where psychologists believe something called diffusion of responsibility occurs, that the number of people, as that - yes.

CONAN: It has to - if there's a large number of people, it's not an individual's responsibility anymore. It's, hey, if Charlie over there doesn't do it, why should I do it?

Prof. BANAJI: That's correct. Try dropping a penny in an elevator with one other person present versus six others present, and you'll find the number of people helping to pick it up just drop precipitously.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=114287592