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A week ago, a video swept across the Web, which caused a big stir. Young people conducted a “research” – how willing are passers-by to help a person demonstrating a sudden deterioration in health (the actor grabs his stomach and sits on the pavement). The video was filmed in Russia and America. The results are discouraging – people in Russia pass by, people in the US rush to help.
Let’s try to figure it out. In fact, sociopsychological research into helping strangers on the street is decades old. There is a special methodology for their implementation, which allows to equalize the conditions. For example, in one of the most famous studies of 2001, which was conducted in 23 countries*, scientists carefully “levelled” the conditions of the experiment: the places in the city must be the same in terms of social status, the actors must repeat the same actions exactly, the time of the experiment – strictly coincide with the rhythms of cities. The results of this study show that the most responsive people live in Latin America and Europe, and the most callous in New York and Kuala Lumpur.
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- I can’t stand the crowd
As a result of an avalanche of such studies, it became clear that helping strangers on the street depends on many factors. For example, the video shows that the Russian part was filmed in a place where a lot of people are walking in one direction, that is, this is the business part of the city. In America, it takes place in a recreation area where people do jogging or walk with strollers. The video simply illustrates a well-known fact: the larger the crowd of people and the higher the pace of walking, the less likely it is to help strangers. But there are many other factors as well – the gender, age and appearance of the stranger, the type of help he is asking for. For example, in the New York study mentioned above, 75% of the time people offered to help the actor playing the blind man cross the road, but only 22% of the time they helped the person who sprained his leg.
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- Where do altruists come from?
In social psychology, the term “bystander effect” or “bystander apathy effect” has been around for many years. The term appeared after a sensational incident that occurred in 1964 in New York, when a young girl died at the hands of a killer, and witnesses to the crime did nothing to help her. Although later it turned out that everything was not quite so, the case had a huge public outcry and led to the creation of public squads in the United States.
The bystander effect has little to do with culture. It can be difficult for people to help when they are part of a group that exhibits the same behavior. For example, when everyone is walking at a brisk pace or just standing and watching. This is due to various reasons, primarily with our adjustment to group behavior.
The bitter truth seems to be that our behavior, whether we are Russians or Americans, whether we consider ourselves altruists or not, depends very much on the circumstances. Sometimes, in order to break the circle of indifference, you need to show courage and the ability to think for yourself.
* R. Levine et al. «Cross-cultural differences in helping strangers». Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2001, № 32(5).