Psychologist Dr. Harold Takooshian sees strong evidence of the Bystander Effect in Neistat’s bike-theft experiment. “When it comes to this fellow with the bike,” he says, “there are several reasons the people don’t intervene.”
“The first is that they don’t notice what’s going on — many people in the video simply don’t seem to see him. We call that stimulus overload. People in cities are surrounded by much more stimuli, so they filter things out. The second is that they notice him, but what’s happening is ambiguous, so they actively ignore it.” In other words: Why would someone so brazenly steal a bike? There must be an innocent explanation. “The third is that people notice it, but they don’t know what to do. And the fourth is fear — they know they should do something, but they’re afraid to challenge someone with a hacksaw.”
“Apathy,” concludes Dr. Takooshian, “is only a minor factor.”
The first two possibilities, stimulus overload and ambiguity, are both influenced by density, a key indicator of whether people are likely to intervene. It’s easy to understand why urban density leads to stimulus overload and might cause a passerby to miss something. But density — specifically, a space dense with people — heightens ambiguity too, in a very particular way.
“Say you’re in a city, and it looks like someone is about to steal a bicycle,” says Ervin Staub, author of “Overcoming Evil” and a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “It’s already a somewhat ambiguous situation. Maybe the person is trying to get their own bicycle. But it’s made even more ambiguous because there are many other people around, all these potential helpers, and no one is taking action. That communicates something to you.”
In short: If you see people acting like something is no big deal, you assume the same. It’s the same reason comedy clubs hire professional laughers — we act like the people around us. Staub describes an experiment he once conducted in which two people sit in a room, one of them secretly working for the psychologist. Suddenly there are shouts of distress from a neighboring room. If the psychologist’s helper worries aloud that something is wrong, the subject goes to investigate “100 percent of the time.” But if the helper says he thinks everything is probably fine, three out of four subjects will stay put.
Although, having lived in Chicago for, what, 17 years, I think Chicagoans are far nicer on the whole than people I've encountered in far smaller towns (like where I grew up, for example -- I remember when I first moved to Chicago, being surprised at how much friendlier and talkative Chicagoans were, relative to my experience in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And while the advent of cell phones has probably zoned out a lot of people, relative to what's around them, I still find Chicagoans to be a generally friendly, helpful, and affable lot -- I've seen it said enough times that Chicago is like a giant small town, if that makes any sense. People come and are surprised at the friendly reception they get.
Obviously, there are exceptions -- you throw millions of people together and you will invariably encounter your share of assholes, but they are rarities. At least in my experience.
I always give up my seat on the bus for old people and pregnant women -- I remember back in the 90s, some heavy old lady keeled over on the sidewalk, and Exene and I and two other Chicagoans rushed to help her. Admittedly, I've been on plenty of buses when nobody but me gives up their seat. That does piss me off, but I don't chalk it up to people living in the city that makes this happen, versus people simply not paying attention to their surroundings and/or being jerks.
In all of my years here, I only had one attempt to steal my bike (some kid tried to steal my bike seat -- he'd been trying to jam the seat on his own bike, having forgotten to toggle the quick release on his own bike, because he was nervous. I'd run out and confronted him, said "Kid. Give me back my seat." and he did, then slunk his skinny, ratlike teen self the hell away from there, riding away on his own seatless bike). So, in 17 years, I've had exactly one attempt to steal (part) of my bike. Whereas, when in a small town in Ohio, my college town, I had a bike get almost completely stolen (they took everything but the frame) within a year. Just saying.
I think the necessity of interaction and the cosmopolitan nature of city living requires at least some measure of civility (I'm applying this to Chicago; New Yorkers are a different breed -- bigger city, different rules). Chicagoans are, by and large, a fairly outgoing and affable group of people (I'm resisting da urge ta start tacking in a Chicahgo accent, here!) The essence of suburban living is seclusion and sequestration -- you are surrounded by folks who are, at least superficially, just like you -- the same race, the same socioeconomic class. You don't have to interact with anybody you don't want to. You don't have to give up a seat on the bus for anybody, because, of course, you're not on a bus. You're likely commuting. Alone (of course, because only socialists would carpool). The suburbs are where you don't want surprises; the whole reason you live there is to avoid surprises, to avoid anything you don't like or understand. That certainty of experience is integral to suburban living -- it's why the houses look the same, have the same lawn configuration, people drive the same cars, and even have the same stores and restaurants at the same malls (and it's trippy to me -- you can see that, too -- all the same store chains are representing at every suburb I've ever seen.)
Obviously, I live in one of Chicago's best neighborhoods, but there is still a huge diversity of people I deal with daily -- blacks, Latinos, Asians, Africans (like blacks directly from Africa), Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Polish, French, Middle Easterners, Indians, gays, goths, punks, preps, etc. Every day. There are still restaurants and places around that aren't chains, are local, and the city is in constant flux. The Chicago of 1993, when I first moved here, is not the same as the Chicago of 2012! Even the skyline has changed.
So, while I understand what the researchers are studying, I don't think it applies equally to all cities, honestly. They should probably do a study like that in the suburbs -- have a white person with a stalled SUV, see if they get helped, and how quickly, versus having a minority person with a stalled SUV, and see how long it takes for them to get help and/or arrested in the suburbs. Better still to have the person trying to break into their own vehicle, see what happens. Is it any wonder that the suburbs has spawned some of the most mean-spirited politics our country has ever seen (which embodies the GOP these days, a party that has curdled itself into a terrible place, to the point that Reagan himself would be drummed from its ranks as a communist)? It's hard to pretend to be "good people" when you're busy kicking everybody who's not Just Like You(tm) in the teeth. I'm drawing from my folks' 90s experience in Columbus, too, which epitomized homogenized upper- and upper middle class suburban living, when I think of how these suburbs tend to be.
Remember White Flight? That was the historical root of the explosion of suburbanism -- white folks feared integration with black folks, and fled the inner cities for safe, white, wealthy suburbs. Chicago has its "collar counties" -- DuPage, Will, Kane, McHenry -- all Republican bastions, all very white, very wealthy, and other things (see demographics below). Every city has its equivalent suburbs.
Anyway, no matter how suburbanites want to slice it, the founding ideal of their experience was rooted in fear of The Other, and we know exactly the color of The Other. How can any community rooted in racism be just, kind, and compassionate? Not possible, anymore than apartheid South Africa could be a bastion of justice and human decency...
Chicago: 42% white, 36% black
DuPage County: 77.9% white, 4% black
Will County: 81% white, 10% black (Will County must be going socialist)
Kane County: 79% white, 5% black
McHenry County: 93% white, .5% black
White people moved to the collar counties to get away from minorities, particularly poor ones. In fact, these people are willing to commute at length just so they don't have to run into anybody they don't want to run into. So, again, it's easy to be gracious and helpful toward your fellow white man (or woman) if you're in the suburbs (and even then, does that happen so often? How often do you interact with your fellow suburbanites, really?) It's more challenging to be gracious and helpful toward someone who is very different from you. But I still see people do that in Chicago (although I would say that, even though Chicago is more cosmopolitan and diverse than any of its suburbs, Chicago still remains very segregated between North Side and South Side experiences). White or black or Latino or Asian, living in the North Side of Chicago is a very different city experience than living in the South Side.
Enough on that. I'll wager that if somebody's in trouble in Chicago, they're far likelier to get help here than they would in other big cities.
