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Nostalgia: Bystander Effect · Why We Do What We Do

• 0:00
  Hey folks, Shane here with why we do what we do, just dropping
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  in to share a little bit of information about the Israeli Palestine conflict that's going
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  on right now as part of the podcast. What we're trying to do is
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  share some resources and share some facts about what might be going on, and
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  so hopefully this is helpful for you to grow your knowledge about this conflict and
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  hopefully learn a little bit about what's going on in this really complicated and unfortunate
• 0:23
  situation. So the fact today is going to be a little bit about where
• 0:27
  the Palestinian people are, which is currently there mostly centralized in Gaza and the
• 0:32
  West Bank in the Middle East. This is an interesting area mostly because up
• 0:37
  until nineteen forty eight there were multiple nations controlling this area. So the British
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  were involved in kind of some of the controlling lands and some of it as
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  you could imagine with England and the British being involved in a lot of stuff.
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  So the British were involved in controlling some of the lands. The West
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  Bank was ruled by Jordan, the Gaza Strip was ruled by Egypt. There
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  was a war and currently the Palestinian people are living under military occupation. So
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  that's one of the major conflicts that's going on since nineteen sixty seven. The
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  Palestindians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are living under military occupation from
• 1:15
  the Israeli government. That is where we're at right now, and I just
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  wanted to share that little bit of information. We are going to continue to
• 1:21
  share more and obviously these are going to be bite sized bits of information as
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  we go, but we're going to share more information as we go, and
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  we are also going to share a resource this week. The resource we want
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  to share is a documentary called Five Broken Cameras came out in twenty eleven.
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  It's described on IMDb as a documentary on a Palestinian farmer's chronicle of his nonviolent
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  resistance to the actions of the Israeli army. So this follows a farmer and
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  his son. He gets his first camera. He's going to start kind of
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  filming and starts seeing the Israeli government beginning to bulldoze olive groves and start to
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  kind of build these settlements and take away some of the land of the Palestinian
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  people during this time. And so I think it's a powerful documentary. It's
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  called five cameras, because every time there is a new camera, it is
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  either shot or smashed or destroyed, and so it's just an example of really
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  good, nonviolent resistance in the face of extremism in that type of government rule.
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  So it's called five Cameras. It's available now. You can check it
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  out and thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed the show. You're
• 2:29
  listening to Why We Do What We Do? Welcome to Why We Do what
• 2:42
  we Do. I am your standing by host Abraham, and I am your
• 2:46
  pluralist host Shame or Psychology podcast. We talk about all the things that people
• 2:51
  do. And you know, when we started this podcast, we did sort
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  of a lot of topics you might find in a psych one oh one class.
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  Yes, so we many, well not, I can't even say we
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  actually I was listening to the episode, and apparently I was part of the
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  team at the time, but I wasn't doing anything on the show like I
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  think I might have been, like helping with stuff. So I did get
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  referenced a couple of times in the show, which I thought was funny.
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  In this in this particular episode, but many years ago, we covered the
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  topic of bystander effect which you know was I think Mede famous by Seinfeld.
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  Sure, and a horrible story that we'll recount to the beginning of the episode
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  when we were player a nostalgia episode. But all that is to say,
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  this is a nostalgia episode. So if you're joining us for the first time,
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  welcome. Sometimes we do this format where we replay some of our older
• 3:38
  episodes and we then give an update talk about what has happened since then.
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  Yes, well, replay the whole thing in its entirety and then we'll sort
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  of come back and talk to you more about that. But before we do
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  that, we'd like to recognize that on this day we are celebrating the Gopher
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  a Ride Day holiday. Yeah, go for a ride. I like that.
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  It's also the Humane Society Anniversary Day. Oh that's great, that's fine.
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  Yeah, it's Love your Freckles Day, particularly for Judy Bloom fans.
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  Yep. Nice. At the time this is coming out, it's the day
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  before Thanksgiving, so it makes sense that today is National Cranberry Relish Day.
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  Okay. It is also a National Jukebox Day. Put a quarter in,
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  play a song. Yeah, but don't bully the jukebox and don't play freebird.
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  That song's too long. That's funny. That's just mean. It's National
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  taiwan On Day, which means you're supposed to put on your apron and start
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  cooking for Thanksgiving. Apparently that does make some amount of sense. Thanksgiving is
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  tomorrow, in fact, so happy Thanksgiving as well. Yeah, it's also
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  what do you love about America Day? And maybe that's Thanksgiving? Ah,
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  yeah, and maybe that's a whole number of things, or maybe it's few
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  things. Who knows. Everybody's got their personal opinions on that. It's true.
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  It's also World Anti Microbial Awareness Week. That's great because when we're talking
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  about being around one another in these big gatherings and we know that there's still
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  a lot of diseases out there spreading. Now, there's a lot of food
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  going on around the holidays, so wash those hands, sterilize those dishes,
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  wear a mask when it makes sense to wear a mask, do all that
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  sort of things. Yeah, all that sort of thing. Yeah, all
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  these sorts of things. Don't be gross, don't be gross, be clean,
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  so that nobody gets sick anymore. Yes, I like that. Okay,
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  So let's jump into this real quick. As a quick reminder, we're
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  talking about the bystander effect. I don't even know if that's a remindered we
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  say that's what we're talking about. Yet I don't think we did well.
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  No, I think we did okay great while we're talking about the bystander effect
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  and just a reminder of what that is. We're going to break that down
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  as when replay this episode. But it's this theory that in an emergency situation,
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  seeing other people around will discourage the observer from helping. So some kind
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  of emergency, there's a lot of people in the crowd, and rather than
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  one person or anybody running into help, everyone kind of stands there expecting someone
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  else to run into help, and nobody does. That's the idea of the
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  bystander effect. Going back and listening to this episode, I think that you
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  guys covered it really well actually, and there's not really a lot to add
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  in terms of corrections. I don't think that there's really any corrections I would
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  have because it's kind of a weird topic. But I do think that there
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  are some points that I want to kind of further elaborate on from the episode
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  that I think, based on some current research, some more recent research,
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  it's worth kind of diving into to show how complex this quote unquote effect is.
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  So this episode came out on February fourteenth, twenty eighteen, and since
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  then there's been some sort of updates, although one thing that we didn't include
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  in the original one is this study or this paper from Plotner and colleagues which
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  showed that children demonstrated the issue of the bystander effect. They specifically cite the
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  issue being a result of diffusion of responsibility, which is kind of what it
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  sounds like, the idea that if there's a lot of people that can be
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  responsible, then nobody feels directly responsible because that the feeling of responsibility is diffused
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  among the crowd, if you will. But based on the discussion, it
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  would make sense that young learners might struggle with intervening because A they'd never been
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  exposed to an emergency or probably not one of that magnitude. B, they
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  have absolutely no training in how to manage the emergency. C They have absolutely
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  no clues related to the experience to make a decision and that type of circumstance.
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  And I would also say D that they've probably likely been told to specifically
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  not intervene in emergency situations. They have a history of being around authority figures
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  and adults who are always responsible for taking part of an emergency, and when
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  they're observing one, they're sort of looking around for who's going to do something
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  about this. I'm not supposed to do something about this. Adults do something
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  about this. So I think there's lots of reasons to consider that the diffusion
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  of responsibility is maybe not the relevant independent variable that has them not acting,
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  and that we can look at contextual features of their learning history that most likely
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  explain that behavior better. And honestly, like, I think about a like,
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  let's say there's an emergency in the kindergarten class. If like some four
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  or five year old stands up and is like I got this, I'm gonna
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  be like, what is happening right now? Yeah? Like what world am
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  I living in that a five year old is leading? I mean not to
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  say that they couldn't, but it's very unlikely they have like the real world
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  experience and applications to safely navigate that type of thing. Yeah, very much
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  so. But it's kind of funny to think about though. It's very cute.
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  It's very cute to see like the think about like kindergartener's navigating like an
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  emergency. Oh there's a fire, yeah, kind of going into more research
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  leaps at all. In twenty nineteen, they used CCTV or close circuit TV.
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  They use this footage to evaluate intervention tactics of bystanders and actually found that
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  bystanders were more likely to intervene if they had a clear social relationship with that
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  person in that situation, they were more rapidly intervening. They were more likely
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  to intervene than if it was a stranger or somebody that was kind of an
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  unknown or unfamiliar. So the stronger or the closer the relationship, they were
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  more likely to intervene. But they also go so far as a site that
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  the primary challenge of any sort of research on bystander effect is related to setting.
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  So lab setting cannot act acurately replicate those actual emergency situations, specifically because
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  nobody's at risk. Yeah right, nobody is actually at risk, So they
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  can't simulate somebody being at risk. I mean you mentioned before the study where
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  they would like start kind of filtering smoke under the door and see how quickly
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  people would respond and all that, But when it comes to people actually being
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  at risk. There's nobody at risk, and so the effects are going to
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  be skewed because it's not an actual emergency. Yeah, yeah, you just
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  can't. You just can't get through I r be the approval to like create
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  an actual panic in like a social environment, right, And if you tried
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  to, like, unless you had engineered it pretty carefully, like, most
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  people are going to see right through it. And even if you have engineered
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  it pretty carefully, they're probably going to see right through it. And if
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  you've done it so carefully that they don't see right through it, again,
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  you're probably getting in trouble for doing something ethical. So it has to be
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  more post talk and observational than it is experimental, right, And it's a
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  it's just the nature of the thing, Like it's just how how things like
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  that work. In twenty twenty one, Kettri and Marx discuss the effects of
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  bystander sexual assault prevention programs, and this goes on to confirm what we had
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  said before. The knowledge and experience about a situation is more likely to reduce
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  bystander effect. So simple education campaign is going to at least mitigate this to
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  some extent. In the extent to which it actually exists, which we will
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  we will talk more about when we replay this, right absolutely. So that's
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  just kind of a little bit about what research. I mean, there has
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  been there's a couple other studies out there, but they all kind of confirm
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  the same thing, where it's usually relationship has an impact, experience has an
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  impact, all of those things that kind of really make it. So it's
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  like maybe bystander effect is not a thing. Maybe it's just like lack of
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  experience. Yeah, all right, so why don't we bystander effect. Let's
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  go ahead and jump into this discussion. I guess first we'll do some ads
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  and then we'll do the discussion. Sure, I love this is Abraham and
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  Ryan. Oh and so this is why we do what we do. And
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  I'm going to start off as I like to do sometimes by I'm going to
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  ask you a couple of questions. Oh all right, let's let's hear it.
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  Okay, Well, just wanted to start. So first, RHYANO,
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  have you ever been in a situation, I mean you personally really where you
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  saw something horrible or maybe an emergency happening in real life, Like has that
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  ever happened to you. Yes, we'll talk about it. Okay. So
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  one time that I recall this is unfortunately having a couple of times, like
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  I have driven up on car rex okay, And so I can think of
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  three distinct ones. And one I was like way too little and that was
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  just not really my responsibility to kind of do anything, which we'll talk about
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  a little bit more. I remember my dad, Yeah, I remember my
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  dad stopping and whatnot. One when I was driving back from grad school actually
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  and I stopped, but there was a bunch of other people that stopped and
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  kind of helped out, okay. And then there was one other one that
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  I can distinctly remember as well. So like had those sort of things happen
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  and what did you do when you were in the situation. Let's look at
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  the third one. So the third one I've got as close to like stopping
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  and then like calling nine one one, But I was not there in a
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  situation to where like I was actually like helping somebody like immediately like hands on.
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  Have you ever been in a place where you did have to like help
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  someone hands on? Yes, I have, But like it was primarily usually
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  like when I was working in some sort of setting in which I was providing
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  active treatment. Ah, I see, Okay, so that maybe a little
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  bit different than what we're talking about today. So one thing and that has
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  been noticed is that when there is a a large group of people often I
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  mean you think of like a crowded street in an urban area or something like
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  that, or even maybe in a mall, and some kind of emergency takes
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  place where some kind of intervention is needed, either someone's being attacked or they're
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  having some kind of medical emergency. What has been noticed is that relatively few
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  people will jump in and help in the situation like that when they're in a
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  big crowd. However, if there's only a few people around, maybe only
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  one or two, you know, maybe smaller than that. But the smaller
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  the number, the more correlation there is, the more likely that someone in
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  that group is to jump in and offer their assistance in some way. Okay,
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  And there have been a lot of infamous examples of this happening, and
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  so this has become known in social psychology as what's called the bystander effect.
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  And I mean, basically it is what it says that it sounds like,
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  right, is that you're someone who's a bystander you were sort of observing a
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  thing that's taking place, and rather than intervening, you either watch, or
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  you go away, or you do something other than help, right, Yeah,
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  And there are some reasons that might happen, but yeah, I think
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  the ones that are probably most relevant and people can probably relate to most quickly
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  is like you'll see something tragic happening on TV and you'll see a ton of
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  people filming as opposed to helping. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, Yeah,
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  And there's been some like some movies have sort of used that and how they
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  portray emergency situations as well. And so yeah, this episode, this is
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  the why why do we buy stander effect? And as we'll see, I'm
• 14:13
  gonna ask the question instead, why don't we buy standard effect? And so
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  really what we're going to be talking about and we're going to get into when
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  this does take place, but this might actually be more of an exception than
• 14:24
  a rule, or you know, they happen in a more complicated way than
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  just the size of the group. Yeah. So my experiences, I feel
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  like I could say I've been on both ends of the spectrum of like helping
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  or sitting and watching. Okay, one did come to mind something at work
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  where it was a So I work in a place in which there can be
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  crist sees quite frequently, as our definition, and like, we have very
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  good systems around that, but my rule doesn't partake in handling those now.
• 14:52
  But everybody's trained jump in and get involved. But this one was like really
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  outside of the typical sort of ones that we deal with. And we were
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  all in a meeting and quite a few of us have all been extensively trained
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  on how to respond to these sort of things, and everyone sat there for
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  a second before someone kind of took off. So I guess there's there's been
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  both ends of the spectrum. I've definitely experienced. Okay, so in general,
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  it's like this, we experienced a situation where something horrible, frightening happens
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  and you just don't move right. Yeah, you might just watch, you
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  might like try and escape. I mean, it sort of depends on the
• 15:30
  situation, but yeah, it is. It is not it is doing something
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  basically other than providing assistants or jumping into that situation. Yeah, so I've
• 15:37
  seen this being brought into and kind of like overextended sometimes or properly maybe extended.
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  I don't know. I guess we'll find out as we get more into
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  this, like into workplaces, so like that might be people actively performing CPR
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  in the public and like people responding to different types of emergencies in hospital settings,
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  right right, yeah, absolutely, yeah. So essentially what happens is
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  that there's just there seems to be that there's a decreased likelihood of someone actually
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  acting in those situations. And this is talked about as this like diffusion of
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  responsibility, which is to say that if there's a large enough group around,
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  everyone in the group, according to this you know, idea of diffusion of
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  responsibility, feels slightly less responsible for intervening because there are so many people that
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  it's sort of like that responsibility is spread along among many people or just whatever
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  the situation is, at least it's not it's not me if I'm you know,
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  if I'm there, if it's not you, and that's it's that sense
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  of I'm not responsible for dealing with this because there's so many other people here,
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  someone else is going to be able to do that. There are some
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  other reasons that people might sort of justify not jumping in on a situation that
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  looks like there needs to be an intervention. And one of them is kind
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  of linked to this idea of the responsibility is that you might not know what's
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  going on. It might be very confusing to see, you know, people
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  who are friendly with each other might get in sort of a scuffle or some
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  kind of fight that's not really an altercation. They're not actually trying to hurt
• 17:08
  each other, and so you don't know, Like you just you can't necessarily
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  look at a situation and know right away whether or not it is an emergency,
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  whether or not intervention is warranted in that situation, and you know,
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  you have to comprehend that that's what's going on in order to make a decision
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  to act right. Another one is that if you feel like it's an emergency
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  where you don't have the kind of competence needed to intervene. So, for
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  example, if you've never been if you've never seen someone have a seizure,
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  and you've never been trained on how to respond to someone who's having a seizure,
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  you might look at that and say like, I'm going to do more
• 17:44
  harm than good, right, And like, I know what's happening. It's
• 17:47
  not that I don't understand it. I'm not confused about the situation, but
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  I have absolutely no idea what it could possibly be doing right now. I
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  feel a lot less competent in the situation. Exactly or similarly to that,
• 17:56
  is you just you don't know what you could possibly be doing, especially if
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  it's something where you are maybe slightly removed, where it's like it's on it's
• 18:06
  across a busy intersection, or it's somewhere where you can see what's happening,
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  but you sort of feel helpless. You don't really know what you could be
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  doing to try and intervene on what's going on. People are far away or
• 18:15
  they're on you know, you maybe can see out a window something's happening below
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  you. It's difficult, difficult to know exactly what you can do. Another
• 18:23
  one that I've thought of is we're in a particular time in history, I
• 18:29
  guess where people will do sort of performance art pieces out in public that might
• 18:34
  look like an emergency, but they're really more part of an art And it
• 18:37
  would be unfortunate to go tackle someone who is doing a performance and then try
• 18:45
  and help them when they were trying to maybe communicate in some way via their
• 18:48
  art form. And I mean, that's just it overlays with some of the
• 18:52
  things we've already discussed. You don't really know what's going on, you're not
• 18:56
  really sure what to do, and this might not even an emergency, right.
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  And then another thing that I thought about and has been talked about is
• 19:07
  if you trying to intervene just means that there's gonna be one more victim in
• 19:11
  that situation. It's you know, if there's really literally nothing that could be
• 19:15
  done. If you see I've thought of example of a building, a burning
• 19:19
  building. Now that might not be a great example, because there might be
• 19:22
  some things that you can do in that situation. But I mean, if
• 19:25
  you see something someone's getting attacked by a shark, like, do you jump
• 19:30
  in the water and try and wrestle them away from the shark, because what's
• 19:33
  probably going to happen is the shark has two lunches instead of one, you
• 19:36
  know what I mean, rather than it so you're not you really don't even
• 19:40
  necessarily help by going in and trying to do some kind of some kind of
• 19:45
  intervention that situation because like you just you don't have the capacity. And that
• 19:48
  again goes back to feeling helpless and what to do or unclear on what to
• 19:52
  do. So it's just difficult that there's a lot of things that might be
• 19:57
  going on, rather than just well there's a lot of people here, I'm
• 20:00
  not going to do anything. Yeah, so there was one infamous example,
• 20:06
  Yeah, Kitty Genevese. Yeah or right, I heard I thought I heard
• 20:11
  Geneviez. I don't know. I heard the others. I heard the others
• 20:15
  from I mean, I don't know for sure. Yeah, I guess I
• 20:18
  heard that from a few different sources last night when I was finishing up my
• 20:21
  notes. I'll trust you then, Yeah, So do you want to describe
• 20:26
  that situation? Yeah, so this was back in the sixties. Kitty Genevieve's
• 20:30
  was coming home late at night. I think she worked at a bar.
• 20:33
  It was about three am or something. So she comes home and she's attacked
• 20:38
  in the parking lot of her apartment building. Again very very late at night
• 20:44
  or early in the morning. However, the parking lot of the street.
• 20:48
  I think it was a parking lot. I was told the street. Now,
• 20:49
  maybe it's the street. The point was I've seen both, Okay,
• 20:52
  okay, well it's unclear. Maybe we're unclear at least, so anyway,
• 20:56
  she was only about one hundred feet away from the door to her building.
• 20:57
  That's maybe the relevant fece. So she was on her way there she was
• 21:00
  attacked, and when this was originally reported, it was reported as there being
• 21:06
  you know, a bunch of witnesses and nobody did anything. Okay, yeah,
• 21:10
  well, first of all, you can you can generally assume that if
• 21:11
  it's three am, there's probably not going to be a bunch of witnesses regardless
• 21:15
  of what's going on. But it was actually the case that if you look
• 21:18
  at the police reports, there were only a few people that actually heard anything
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  at all. Of the few that heard what was going on, only a
• 21:29
  few of them could even see what was going on. Of the few that
• 21:32
  could see what was going on, only a few of them could really perceive
• 21:34
  that this was actually some kind of of an emergency. And of those people
• 21:38
  who were could see this and perceived that it was an emergency, at least
• 21:44
  one person immediately shouted out of their apartment to the person who was attacking.
• 21:48
  They were on a higher story, I believe, so they yelled out their
• 21:51
  window, and at least somebody did call the police. And this all happened
• 21:56
  relatively soon after she was attacked, and when that person yelled out the window,
• 22:00
  the attacker did in fact leave, So the police, I think what
• 22:07
  I read initially believed that this was more mostly just a domestic dispute and didn't
• 22:11
  really immediately respond to the situation. The attacker eventually did come back, but
• 22:15
  at that point, Kitty had or Kitty had sort of made her way to
• 22:19
  the door, which was locked, and nobody could really see her there,
• 22:22
  and she was too weak to make a lot of noise. And also you're
• 22:26
  thinking three am and most people are asleep, So the attacker did finish killing
• 22:32
  Kitty at that point. But I mean, this just kicked off this this
• 22:34
  wave of research and sort of social psychology, which you can jump into that.
• 22:41
  Yeah, so it immediately. So what I read was that, and
• 22:45
  we just need to underlie this with like, this is a horrible situation that
• 22:49
  was like, you know, a case studied essentially that turned into this whole
• 22:53
  line of research. Like I don't want to forget the person behind this.
• 22:56
  Yeah, that's I mean, that's fair. Yeah. So the I read
• 23:00
  that the New York Times reported over thirty people had apparently heard or saw to
• 23:06
  some extent of this, and that's kind of like completely incorrect. Yeah,
• 23:10
  and that was kind of the the basis I think of this line of research
• 23:15
  was a lot of people were a lot of people had saw something happened and
• 23:22
  didn't do anything like boom. That's why this line of research like started off,
• 23:26
  Yeah, basically, And so, man, can't you just hear like
• 23:29
  the news report in like a sixties era of voice that like woman attack and
• 23:32
  her apartment building in the morning, thirty on lookers did nothing. You're pretty
• 23:36
  good at that. Thanks, Somebody better jump in and do something right now,
• 23:38
  because emergency there are ads who crisis have hearted We're back. Yeah,
• 23:49
  So that's what happened. And I think it was Darley and I don't know
• 23:53
  how to say the last name Latani. I don't know, I'm gonna go
• 23:56
  with Latani. I'm probably butchering that and I'm so sorry. But they in
• 24:00
  nineteen sixty eight came out with like the original bipan bystander effect study. Some
• 24:04
  of the things that I pulled from this was they they had set up and
• 24:08
  there's been a lot of different studies looking at this and replications and like kind
• 24:11
  of alterations. So I'm gonna speak a little and like over generalizations here,
• 24:15
  but largely what was found is as if you had set up a situation that
• 24:21
  kind of mimics this. So typically they were you come in and someone instructs
• 24:26
  you to do something. I think the main original one and one that's been
• 24:29
  replicated the most was you come in, you're sitting down and you're listening to
• 24:32
  something, and all of a sudden, the person starts to state they have
• 24:36
  some sort of health implications that are going on. The question was how long
• 24:40
  does it take for that person to get up and go notify the experimenters that,
• 24:45
  like, hey, I think something's going on here. So the people
• 24:48
  who were in the audience were they didn't really they didn't know they were.
• 24:51
  That was part of the experiment, yep, correct it. And so they
• 24:53
  are typically like a room sitting by themselves on One of the variables that are
• 24:57
  altered is like how many people are in that room with them as confederates essentially,
• 25:03
  like they know what's going on and the person, the main person there
• 25:07
  doesn't know that those people are confederates and it's confederates, and so that's kind
• 25:11
  of the typical situations. Alterations are like they might be sitting in a room
• 25:15
  and working on some paperwork and some smoke starts to come from underneath a door.
• 25:18
  Right, So there's some alterations and it's been studied even i think a
• 25:23
  little bit publicly through this sort of like mimicking those performance arts that you gave
• 25:30
  us an example of. And so in general with all of these sort of
• 25:33
  the different ways in which you can look at this, the number of people
• 25:37
  in the room or in the situation was the number one factor that people looked
• 25:41
  at. And largely if you're alone, you're going to respond in a way
• 25:45
  in such you go tell somebody and you like say, hey, this is
• 25:48
  a problem the most. But if you have more people in the room,
• 25:52
  that's going to diminish over the number of people there. So the original study
• 25:55
  was like alone, it was somewhere around eighty one percent of the time,
• 25:57
  people within six minutes would tell the experimenters like, hey, something's going on
• 26:02
  here. I think that you should go check out. And when it was
• 26:04
  two people were in the room with that person, it dropped to sixty ish
• 26:08
  percent of the people actually did something within the six minutes, and then with
• 26:14
  their five people in the room, it was around thirty percent or so of
• 26:18
  those people did something in those six minutes. Does that make sense? Okay,
• 26:22
  So imagine that just kind of like generally is seen in this research.
• 26:26
  Now, when we talk about research and we see these consistent patterns over time,
• 26:30
  where like what do we usually do, Like we're like, hey,
• 26:32
  this is something that's being replicated and kind of seen, right, Like there
• 26:36
  is some sort of effect here, right, Yeah, And so there's different
• 26:41
  ways in which this was interpreted. One of the main ones that I saw
• 26:44
  is that there's these various rules that we form, and it's assumed that people
• 26:48
  make these rules. Now I don't know where like they're getting these rules from.
• 26:51
  It's like these social norms I guess that are just like made up in
• 26:53
  our head and everyone agrees to all of a sudden. I mean, obviously
• 27:00
  we've talked in other episodes that they can come from so many different places and
• 27:03
  how we're raised and our experiences with those types of situations are level of training,
• 27:08
  what the general context is. But I mean, just generally sort of
• 27:12
  speaking, where those rules come from, I think is going to be.
• 27:17
  Without having the data in front of me, we can always sort of say
• 27:19
  this is going to be at least part of the culture. Yes, and
• 27:22
  so the way in which I saw so, either the researchers or the people
• 27:26
  talking about the research generally would describe it in the sense of like there's two
• 27:30
  types of rules, like that we should help rule versus we should sit around
• 27:33
  and do what everyone else is doing rule. And what I guess I was
• 27:36
  bringing up is like I don't know where these rules are coming from, per
• 27:38
  se, but that is the description of like, Oh, I guess that's
• 27:41
  like their end things like, oh, we have these rules, and when
• 27:45
  we form these rules, that's the explanation of why this event's happening. And
• 27:48
  that's not good enough for me. Yeah, no, I think that that's
• 27:51
  fair. And also it's one of those things where that's just sort of an
• 27:56
  interpretation of the data that doesn't have a control or any real experiment to that
• 28:00
  that's what's going on, And they didn't isolate that variable, so it was
• 28:03
  more of just a hypothesis about what could be taking place without data to back
• 28:08
  it up, and data in this situation would be pretty difficult to collect,
• 28:14
  which we'll be talking about data in an upcoming episode and how difficult that is
• 28:18
  to collect. But yeah, there were some things that you actually sort of
• 28:22
  brought this up, but to point out so one thing that we said about
• 28:23
  the bystander of fact, it's not just the fact that people don't do anything,
• 28:29
  but also maybe how long it takes for them to intervene as part of
• 28:33
  it. But then there's also a really important caveat in here in terms of
• 28:36
  how this research was actually conducted. Yeah, so it's always very important like
• 28:40
  how was your design actually set up and what questions we were asking and what
• 28:45
  were you doing and what weren't you doing? As well, I think that
• 28:48
  what weren't you doing is sometimes miss like it's not dropped in there, right,
• 28:52
  and so it can be really important in understanding maybe why the results turned
• 28:56
  out the way they did. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that was
• 29:00
  if I can, I guess be the person saying I think that was kind
• 29:03
  of overlooked for a while in these research lines. And so there was one
• 29:06
  interesting thing that was done by Fisher at All twenty eleven where they kind of
• 29:11
  looked at the different research that'd have been done and they kind of looked at
• 29:15
  whether or not the people the Confederates were told to be passive and instructive to
• 29:22
  be passive, kind of like bystanders and watching and not do anything, versus
• 29:25
  be active and actually like initiate or like go with the idea of like we
• 29:30
  should be helping in these situations. Got it, And that provides exactly pretty
• 29:36
  much the complete opposite effect when people were told to be active as these confederates
• 29:41
  in these situations. And so what's very interesting to me is that it's no
• 29:45
  longer really than the bystander effect. If you tell these confederates be active,
• 29:48
  it's kind of like the helper effect. Like you see the opposite effect happening
• 29:52
  here. So basically what you're saying is that if they told the people who
• 29:56
  were observing or they were going into situation or they had to where there was
• 30:00
  going to be an emergency, if they had given them the instruction beforehand to
• 30:04
  watch and see what happens to be pasitive, basically that they were then less
• 30:10
  likely to respond in in a way they were helping out the experimenter by following
• 30:14
  their instructions, versus if they were told to do something, then they would
• 30:17
  jump in and do something. Yes. So it's almost like if the bystander
• 30:21
  effect were real problem we were seeing everywhere, then a basic inoculation would be
• 30:25
  to just get on the news and or have the White House tweet out to
• 30:29
  the American people and say if you see something, do something, and then
• 30:33
  boom, you've got it cured. Everyone who sees that tweet is going to
• 30:37
  go take care of it. Yeah. So the original idea was that there
• 30:38
  was some sort of diffusion responsibility that was occurring, and then it kind of
• 30:41
  shifted into I saw another explanation was like, oh, you have these different
• 30:44
  rules that people are conforming to, and then this one kind of proposed like
• 30:48
  maybe it's a level of uncertainty and we need to dive into uncertainty, like
• 30:52
  how certain or uncertain are we in a certain situation, which again doesn't provide
• 30:56
  a super thorough like thing for me. I'm not personally happy of like,
• 31:00
  oh, it's uncertainty, that's what's going on in these situations. Yeah,
• 31:03
  that'd be a hard one to test out as well, but it was a
• 31:06
  really good way to look at this sort of data, like what's actually going
• 31:10
  on, right, yeah, absolute situations. And so I guess that's my
• 31:15
  summary and understanding of some of the different social psychology approaches to understanding this phenomenon.
• 31:23
  Well, there was another one that I read about that I thought was
• 31:26
  pretty interesting. Was a social psychology researcher. He also sort of believed that
• 31:32
  there was there was more going on to this bystander effect, and he put
• 31:37
  forth a hypothesis that when people were in a group and they knew the other
• 31:42
  people of the group, that really the social context inside of that group dynamic
• 31:47
  would work as a queue for taking action for being responsible. And so he
• 31:52
  set up some studies where people could see who was being a bystander and who
• 31:56
  was contributing to a situation looking at like who, And I think he did
• 32:00
  it virtually, so they had to like type something in on a computer,
• 32:04
  and so basically you could sit there and do nothing, but it would show
• 32:07
  that you sat there and do nothing. So at the opportunity to respond,
• 32:10
  a lot more people jumped in and responded. Then when he took away that
• 32:15
  people could see who, like who you were if you just had a camera
• 32:17
  pointed at you. I might be remembering this slightly differently than how he did
• 32:22
  it, but it was just interesting to see you something about if there was
• 32:24
  a camera pointed at you or something that again facilitated that worked as a queue
• 32:29
  for people were more likely to take action as a queue of I have a
• 32:31
  social responsibility in this context. And so again it's not just that the number
• 32:36
  of people predicts it's sort of what the context of that situation means to the
• 32:42
  person who's experiencing it. There's another changing gears a little bit is that.
• 32:47
  So we've talked about the fact that there is there was this original sort of
• 32:52
  idea about what the bystander effect is and how prevalent it is and what it
• 32:57
  actually looks like when it's played out, and then we've talked about some of
• 33:01
  the considerations around that in terms of what other kind of variables might be important
• 33:06
  in understanding why people are likely to be a bystander and situations. But then
• 33:14
  there's also this other angle of why do people do these, you know,
• 33:16
  super heroic things? Why do people jump in? And if the bystander effect
• 33:22
  is that prevalent, it shouldn't make sense that you see people who will willingly
• 33:25
  put themselves in harms way to help another person. Again in large group settings.
• 33:30
  I recently heard a story that was on one of the podcasts I listened
• 33:35
  to where there was a guy who's on a subway platform and if you are
• 33:37
  in an urban area where you have subways, you know how incredibly packed those
• 33:42
  places are with people. They're very full in the middle of the day,
• 33:45
  and someone who's on the platform had a seizure, fell onto the tracks,
• 33:51
  and this guy who was there with his daughters, he jumped onto the tracks
• 33:57
  and covered this person with his body to basically put him out of harm's way
• 34:00
  of the of the oncoming train, and they were both okay. You know,
• 34:05
  he basically just stopped him from flailing about and getting himself run over,
• 34:08
  and they ended up being okay. But it was, you know, the
• 34:12
  fact that he responded immediately in this situation in a large group of people.
• 34:16
  That just shows like there might be this bystander effect here and there, but
• 34:21
  like you also see the opposite of that. You see like the people who
• 34:24
  there's a lot of people around, and people immediately jump in and take action.
• 34:29
  There was another story I have about when I was working with an individual
• 34:32
  with an intellectual disability and this particular individual had some they had some behaviors that
• 34:39
  were a little bit dangerous both to themselves and others, and we were instructed
• 34:45
  to do a temporary a temporary physical restraint in the immediate events to prevent the
• 34:50
  onset of harm, and what that looks like essentially is restraining their arms so
• 34:57
  that they can't they can't hurt other people. Well, we were working on
• 35:00
  a socialization program with this individual out in the community, and he escalated really
• 35:05
  fast, and we implemented this procedure, and immediately upon doing so, we
• 35:09
  were accosted by all of these people around us, So what are you doing
• 35:13
  to that person? Leave him alone? And so we had to sort of
• 35:15
  both try and keep that person safe, ourselves safe, and give them are
• 35:20
  We carried information cards on us that said what we were doing and all that
• 35:22
  sort of stuff, and nevertheless, people were calling the police and all that
• 35:27
  sort of thing, and we had to go through and give our account of
• 35:30
  the situation what had taken place, and we were able to get out of
• 35:34
  there safely. Everyone was. But that was just another situation where in a
• 35:38
  public place, immediately five people were there jumping into what they perceived to be
• 35:44
  some kind of emergency where I guess they thought we were mulling some kid in
• 35:46
  a parking lot for some reason. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense
• 35:50
  that people were worried about that, and it's actually cool to see that response
• 35:52
  from the public. Yeah, No, that's what I'm saying, Like,
• 35:54
  it was great that you see those kind of things that people are willing to
• 35:58
  jump in. Yeah. I've been in similar circumstances with different people for similar
• 36:02
  reasons, right, Like you work with a client of some sort, right,
• 36:07
  and yeah, I've had someone claim that they were an FBI agent before
• 36:10
  and I was like, well, I'm pretty sure, like I need to
• 36:13
  see some sort of form of identification. Yeah, could be actually, like
• 36:16
  you know, like you can't we just claiming that the guy disappeared before the
• 36:21
  cops actually showed up because we called the cops ourselves as a part of the
• 36:23
  process. Yeah, and yeah, it just it gets really messy really quick.
• 36:30
  Yeah, really quick, absolutely messing the sense of like there's just a
• 36:34
  lot going on. There's a lot to process, delegate understand, calm down
• 36:37
  and everything. Right. Yeah. So yeah, I think I don't know
• 36:43
  if it's too early, but I think that one thing that largely goes into
• 36:45
  this is the have you had explicit training under these circumstances, right, Like
• 36:51
  the conditions themselves, Like I feel like if I were to overgeneralize, like
• 36:54
  somebody with military background would probably be a little more responsive in general than somebody
• 37:00
  and just out of high school, right, yeah. And actually I had
• 37:06
  made a note in here that I was thinking, what if there were like
• 37:09
  an EMT convention where you have a bunch of like trained medical professionals and right
• 37:14
  outside there's like some kind of medical crisis that takes place. You're gonna have
• 37:16
  five thousand people descend on that situation immediately, you know, And I thought
• 37:22
  that'd be a funny yeah again counter argument and just and mostly just to highlight
• 37:27
  the point of it's not just the number of people, like, there's more
• 37:30
  to it than that. So so this is a good seguey one thing that
• 37:32
  I had found on kind of a more recent ish post I think it was
• 37:37
  twenty fifteen. On psychology Today was Rosemary's Sword and Phillip Sembardo posted an article
• 37:45
  talking about their kind of angle, and it seems like they were trying to
• 37:50
  coin their own term, or at least talk about in a different way,
• 37:54
  and they called these effects of people not really moving around. It was known
• 37:58
  as pluralistic ignorance. And the idea here is when the group's majority privately believes
• 38:04
  one thing and mistakenly assumes that most others believe the opposite, and so that
• 38:10
  was what they suggested, and what I largely saw, I don't know what
• 38:15
  you found was people were trying to create training programs and like awareness strategies around
• 38:20
  like, hey, we just need one person to start acting in those situations.
• 38:22
  Do you find something similar? Yeah? Absolutely, And and have been
• 38:28
  in situations like that, and you know, basically what I've seen sort of
• 38:31
  recommended, as you just said, was that it's the whole going back to
• 38:37
  that if you see something, say something sort of thing, Yeah, you
• 38:39
  really only need you know, one or two people. There was randomly one
• 38:43
  time I was running an errand it was probably nine o'clock at nine or so,
• 38:46
  and there's a there's an underpass of a freeway that's relatively close to my
• 38:50
  house, and for some reason, there was a car that was entirely on
• 38:53
  fire underneath the underpass. It wasn't even on the road, it was off
• 38:57
  the road, but it was completely engulfed in flame. And so immediately called
• 39:00
  the police and they said, oh, yeah, we've had like thirty five
• 39:04
  calls about those already in the last ten minutes. Yeah, so they knew
• 39:06
  what was going on. But yeah, that was the general recommendation. Being
• 39:09
  that. But I mean, you do tend to see that people will do
• 39:12
  that anyway in a lot of circumstances. And there also can be the effect
• 39:15
  of this pluralistic ignorance where you see it and say, well, someone else
• 39:19
  probably already called about that. Well, and often more often than not,
• 39:22
  when I see an emergency situation, I'm catching it when people have already responded
• 39:27
  or or in the act of responding to it. Yeah, so that's not
• 39:30
  like I'm not claiming ignorance that someone else is going to do it. I'm
• 39:32
  seeing them doing it. Yes, exactly, And that was what I was
• 39:35
  describing when I was talking about the car recx that have like been seconds from
• 39:39
  like or seen like there's already so many people involved. I've learned to ask
• 39:45
  certain questions I guess of like what's being covered, and if everything's being covered,
• 39:51
  then I do kind of step back from the situation. But yeah,
• 39:54
  so I've seen a lot of people touting like, oh, we just need
• 39:59
  one person. Zimbardo said he's launched a program, but then I clicked the
• 40:02
  link and it was dead, So I assume that's I assume that's not happening
• 40:06
  anymore. But I wouldn't know because it was just a dead four four screen
• 40:09
  on a page. Okay, so updated in two thousand and one. Yeah,
• 40:15
  it's kidding. Yeah, don't leave websites empty. It costs like twelve
• 40:19
  dollars to like leave a page that says, you know, like we're no
• 40:22
  longer doing this, right, But I'm being picky, all right, So
• 40:27
  what are some other views as to like why this happens? Like, what
• 40:30
  do you think? Well, okay, so let's let's go ahead and start
• 40:32
  with the description of the fact that this can this can happen. There could
• 40:37
  be a situation where there's a large group of people, and part of the
• 40:39
  consideration as someone who's a part of that group is that there's a lot of
• 40:44
  people here, someone else will do something. I'm not in a good position
• 40:46
  to do this. I don't understand what's happening. There could be a lot
• 40:49
  of things that are that are going on, but this can be a situation
• 40:52
  that happens, and because at least partially because there's a large group, nobody
• 40:57
  reacts. Okay, the extent to which that occurs seems to be not really
• 41:01
  that well understood. There's a lot of people who are still doing research on
• 41:05
  this. A lot of research has been done on this. I'm showing exactly
• 41:07
  the opposite of this effect, depending on the circumstances. Another thing I think
• 41:12
  that's really useful to consider is how this might vary across cultures. This one,
• 41:16
  the Kitty Jenevie's story was here in the United States. But if you're
• 41:21
  in a culture maybe where group participation is a lot more important and more heavily
• 41:25
  emphasized, then it's possible that you never see something like the Bysander effect.
• 41:30
  Right. That was something that our own Shane Spiker commented on the posts that
• 41:35
  we put up on Facebook about this. So this thing was what about a
• 41:37
  brief discussion on the flight or flight freeze and kind of like how this may
• 41:40
  be impacted by culture, legality and those sort of things. Yes, which
• 41:44
  I have a thing about the flight fright freeze. Yea, I think so
• 41:51
  culture comes into play. I personally like understanding the differences between cultures and like
• 41:55
  just like it's hard to sort out, Like, yes, there's effects,
• 42:00
  I guess, is my statement right, but in my position, But fully,
• 42:04
  cow is that like a lot of data to sort out and really understand
• 42:07
  it is? And I mean it's also easy to just say, oh,
• 42:08
  it's just the culture and have that be sort of an easy scapegoat to answer
• 42:13
  a lot of questions. And so I think to maybe put it in terms
• 42:15
  that make a little bit more sense, it's to say that having our living
• 42:20
  in a particular setting where the people around you are likely to favor certain types
• 42:27
  of behaviors and to discourage or punish other types of behaviors. That's sort of
• 42:30
  what we mean when we're saying that there's a culture that exists, and yes,
• 42:34
  there definitely needs to be more set about that to understand how that really
• 42:37
  plays a role, and whether we're just sort of saying culture to sound like
• 42:39
  we know what we're talking about, or whether there are really good studies to
• 42:43
  show that, yes, this does in facts change across cultures. It's just
• 42:45
  important to consider that just because this has shown up in certain situations, you
• 42:50
  shouldn't, I think, just assume that it will then exist as a product
• 42:53
  of being a human being. And yeah, so it's basically it's just more
• 42:59
  complicated than the that if the group is large, someone's unlikely to help.
• 43:01
  It's really I think worth considering what each person is experiencing psychologically when they're in
• 43:07
  a situation as a bystander. Okay, yes, perfect. So we we've
• 43:13
  talked in the past. I think it was the memory episode. Uh,
• 43:15
  there's different cues, right and right, all of us can respond to cues
• 43:19
  in different ways, Like we're affected by different like every that's just it's evolving
• 43:23
  and always changing, and those might be and those are going to be different
• 43:27
  for each person, and they might even change for each person as they go
• 43:30
  through life experiencing new situations. Yeah, so I brought this up earlier that
• 43:35
  like there may be maybe it might be an untypical condition that we're not used
• 43:39
  to, and there's different cues going on, and we just do you you
• 43:42
  have it on it too, like we don't know how to react in the
• 43:45
  situation, right. Well, and yeah, I mean hopefully you're not in
• 43:46
  a world where you're just constantly seeing emergency after him. I mean, there
• 43:51
  will be some professions where that's the case, but for most people you're going
• 43:53
  around, you're not just living in a world where it's NonStop emergency. So
• 43:57
  yeah, it is. It is a totally different situation. And as you
• 43:59
  said, that's not a queue that's really strong because most of us don't have
• 44:04
  a lot of learning around that queue. Yeah, So one I guess one
• 44:07
  understanding of like why this happens is I would say everybody individually has a different
• 44:15
  set of reactions to different queues, and those things have been shown to be
• 44:17
  learned and can adapt over time. And that's why we have things like training,
• 44:22
  righteah, absolutely on the job training and refresher training, and like,
• 44:27
  I feel like life is just a continual kind of refresher and sure like every
• 44:30
  time I go to sit down to edit video right now, like I relearn
• 44:35
  things and like I have to kind of get used to it again. Right.
• 44:37
  Piggybacking on this idea of training, the experiences you have up to that
• 44:42
  point are your training. So, for example, I live in a neighborhood
• 44:45
  where at two in the morning, it's not uncommon to hear people like screaming
• 44:47
  and yelling at each other, and people are upperly late and you hear you
• 44:52
  know, cars go screeching by and stuff like that, and it's just that's
• 44:55
  a neighborhood when that sort of thing happens. And so my training living in
• 45:00
  that situation is those types of cues are not emergencies because it's only of small
• 45:06
  handful of times have they been emergencies And there is a way to sort of
• 45:09
  tell the difference, at least for us, and but for the most part
• 45:14
  those things that are not emergencies there would be perceived as emergencies for people who
• 45:19
  didn't live in that type of situation. My neighborhood, and granted we live
• 45:22
  like two and a half miles away from each other, is maybe Max is
• 45:25
  the complete opposite, right, perfectly quiet, right hand things going on,
• 45:30
  everybody's out of their house, like looking at like what's happening. Yeah.
• 45:34
  Yeah, And so another thing to consider is that just thinking about you yourself,
• 45:38
  you as the listener, you Ryan, and me myself, you might
• 45:42
  do the exact same thing by yourself in a crisis situation as you would do
• 45:45
  in a group in the crisis situation. And so it's not the fact that
• 45:49
  you're in a group that's going to necessarily change your response, but the context
• 45:52
  of that situation and how you or me or you know, the listener relates
• 45:55
  to that situation. Yeah, So I I largely was, I guess growing
• 46:02
  up kind of like the I mean, I was like the super quiet kid,
• 46:06
  wouldn't do much like that, And like you too, getting into we
• 46:07
  talk all the time, yeah, and getting into yeah, getting into psychology,
• 46:12
  and like specifically getting some training in crisis situations. I now feel like
• 46:19
  a step up to those sort of things quite often. And it's the complete
• 46:22
  opposite. And it's because these cues I have a totally different training and experience
• 46:28
  with now. Yeah, absolutely, and I feel more more like I am
• 46:32
  aware enough of the type of situations that might occur that I would have the
• 46:37
  competence to do something meaningful in those situations. Yeah, I'm sure you're tired
• 46:40
  of listening to us by now. Let's take a quick pause and listen to
• 46:44
  the refreshing voice of ads. All right, right back into it. So
• 46:54
  another one is just and we sort of talked about this earlier, but a
• 46:59
  way of considering a view of how this how you might perceive these situations is
• 47:04
  the kind of rules that you are already sort of following in your normal,
• 47:07
  everyday life. And so just to sort of give you an example, you
• 47:08
  don't necessarily think about this, but one rule is that you tend to not
• 47:13
  walk right into someone, but you kind of veer around them. And there
• 47:16
  you know, there are reasons for that rule to exist. It's more efficient
• 47:19
  usually to go around them. It is considered rude to walk right into someone's
• 47:22
  face. Ano. The rule is, you know, parking in the lines
• 47:27
  and a parking lot. I know a lot. There are many people who
• 47:29
  violate this rule, but for the most part, if you go to the
• 47:30
  parking lot, the majority of cars are parked between those lines. That's not
• 47:34
  a rule you sit down and think about and look at those and go,
• 47:36
  huh, I wonder if I should park between those lines that are right there.
• 47:39
  You know, it's it's something that we just sort of follow automatically,
• 47:42
  and those rules can reach into our language in how we are interacting with situations
• 47:47
  that are these emergencies, even the ones that we don't really think about in
• 47:52
  the moment. Yeah, and I guess the area of language and like rules
• 47:58
  that I read up on, like I haven't a looked at that recently,
• 48:01
  but I don't know of a lot of extensive of research in that area.
• 48:07
  Do you like in like using that framework to understand language and rules like in
• 48:13
  this particular situation. I actually know you're right, I haven't looked at specific
• 48:16
  research and how people bring rules to that context aside from how as you sort
• 48:22
  of said the active passev one because if you're someone who's gone into a situation
• 48:27
  and been told either be active or just watch that that is a sort of
• 48:31
  implicit rule in that situation that you'd be following. Now, that was not
• 48:36
  specifically set up to study rules by virtue of them being rules, but to
• 48:39
  study the influence of the experimenter on the participants. Right, you have someone's
• 48:45
  looking for like a thesis or dissertation. There it is, Yeah, my
• 48:49
  entire life of research. Yeah, some kind of some kind of research project.
• 48:52
  Go for it. So one other thing that I found, and this
• 48:54
  relates to Geno on Facebook commented's we put out a blast for like, hey,
• 49:01
  this topic's upcoming. What you want what do you want us to cover?
• 49:05
  Oh man, and thank you guys for your responses. We got some
• 49:07
  just really wonderful ideas and responses from the community. So thanks. Yeah.
• 49:10
  So Gina Richards just said, does organizational behavior management which is an area that
• 49:15
  I don't think we've talked about yet. We maybe have alluded to. Yeah,
• 49:16
  I think we've maybe mentioned it sort of on the side, but we
• 49:20
  haven't gone in depth. But we should. That should be in upcomingtion SID
• 49:22
  the kind of use the effect to increase productivity in a sustainable way, and
• 49:28
  so what kind of business or applied considerations does this thing actually have? So
• 49:30
  how are we using this? Is how I understand it, And Gina,
• 49:35
  the best thing that I could find for you, specifically last night in the
• 49:38
  studio staying up was this thing called the actively caring model. It's probably the
• 49:44
  closest thing that you're looking for, but it's not for the bystander effect.
• 49:47
  So it was largely used for occupational safety. Started around the late sixties,
• 49:54
  around the same time. It looked like it might have been influenced since the
• 49:58
  published publication started done at the same time, but it's not at the heart
• 50:01
  of this bystander effect. So we'll definitely include some links to that as well.
• 50:06
  Can you say a little bit more about the actively careful Oh yes,
• 50:08
  Oh my gosh. So the idea essentially to kind of again, I feel
• 50:12
  like I'm over generalizing this, but it's a whole fifty years of research.
• 50:15
  Line is they were trying to figure out how they could get people to identify
• 50:22
  workplace safety issues and is part of it, but as well as say something
• 50:30
  or do something about it, and generally this line of literature looks at like
• 50:34
  how do we prevent things by getting people to do the good things as opposed
• 50:37
  to not doing the things that are bad. So it's sort of saying like
• 50:39
  everyone who's part of an organization asking them to sort of take some amount of
• 50:45
  responsibility for when you notice something like actively contribute to solving a safety issue,
• 50:51
  yeah, or preventing it. So yeah, from the workplace, we know
• 50:53
  that people can there's a lot of kind of corrective ness that happens, right,
• 51:00
  right, So like feedback on what you're doing wrong. Yeah, when
• 51:01
  we don't change, we don't like those sort of things. And largely this
• 51:05
  area of organizational behavior management is found. And what I like about it is
• 51:07
  like you need to focus on the proactive things that you do want to see
• 51:10
  instead of that And so this actively carrying model really resonates with that. So
• 51:15
  if it came, for example, like a workplace safety, maybe you're in
• 51:19
  a place where you need to be wearing gloves in case an emergency happens.
• 51:22
  So let's say you have an EMT. Right, I'm not going to provide
• 51:25
  just negative feedback when I don't see gloves. I'm going to reward to some
• 51:30
  extent when I see gloves are actively being used or even better, the preventative
• 51:35
  of like they are there and available. Does that make sense? Yeah?
• 51:37
  Absolutely? Okay, So yeah, that was the closest thing I could find,
• 51:40
  Gina. It does not clearly like bring over, sorry, but that's
• 51:45
  what I found. And so also bringing it back to as I mentioned earlier,
• 51:50
  this idea of the fight, flight or freeze, which I think I
• 51:52
  said fright earlier. Anyway, fight flight or freeze, and so this refers
• 51:59
  to initially the is this thing called fight, fight, or flight, and
• 52:02
  what that means is in a situation that is you're experiencing anxiety or stress or
• 52:07
  danger, your response is to either engage with the thing that is causing that
• 52:13
  feeling, to like attack it the fight, to get away from it the
• 52:15
  flight, or to just move like stay still and do nothing. And this
• 52:22
  sort of has talked about in the cognitive literature in a way of as it
• 52:27
  being that when there is a chance that you when you're coping with a danger,
• 52:32
  that is you're like handling it, you're getting rid of it, that's
• 52:37
  the fight. The fight. When you are trying to get away from it
• 52:39
  and just escape, that's the flight, and that's when you feel like you
• 52:45
  feel like there is a way for you to escape. The way they talk
• 52:46
  about it is when you're more likely to try and escape. And if you
• 52:50
  do not feel like you can escape, or you're hoping that you will go
• 52:55
  unnoticed, then you'll freeze. And so that's the three ways they s want
• 52:58
  to talk about it. And I think another way that's talk about this is
• 53:00
  a fight is in a situation where the thing that you are motivated by is
• 53:07
  ending that situation by you causing that situation to end, so sort of you
• 53:13
  you're taking action to make it stop or and then the flight is the situation
• 53:19
  where the motivation for you is to just make it go away by getting as
• 53:23
  far away from it as possible but putting you know, increasing distance or whatever
• 53:28
  between you and the thing. And then the freeze is when you you're simply
• 53:34
  motivating, motivated to minim minimize the amount of damage that you're going to take
• 53:38
  as much as possible. And so those are I think some just different ways
• 53:42
  of talking about where the motivation lies with respect to those phenomenon rather than just
• 53:46
  when you're thinking about this, and more like in a freeze situation, escape
• 53:52
  isn't really an option for some reason. Attack isn't really an option for some
• 53:57
  reason. So to try and minimize the amount of damag that might happen,
• 54:00
  it's just you know, don't move sort of thing. Okay, cool,
• 54:04
  well said, all right, ready to take this home. I am so
• 54:07
  one thing that we're getting used to is we actually pulled all of the Facebook
• 54:12
  community to say, what do you think I missed? Uh so we just
• 54:15
  you you just nicely hit Shane Spiker's so thank you for that. We did
• 54:20
  not address at the right time. But Miranda, our own Miranda as well.
• 54:23
  That helps us with editing. Miranda. Yeah, shout out to Miranda
• 54:28
  asked us to just kind of like lay out what we did with the kitty.
• 54:31
  The kitty details, Yeah, just that there was a lot more than
• 54:37
  just what was originally reported and so I think we did that justice. Thank
• 54:39
  you for that. The last one was Massa Koia of the Behavioral Observations podcast.
• 54:45
  Yeah, he's been a heap Observations podcast. He's been super generous and
• 54:47
  shouting us out as well. Yeah, we owe you one. And so
• 54:52
  he was excited for us to dive into this topic since it was really looking
• 54:57
  at they were originally trying to really, I guess get it. The how
• 55:01
  do we measure this effect? Right? Yeah? Right? And his shutout
• 55:05
  so great? Thank you for that, So thank you for all the support
• 55:08
  and the engagement. We're going to make sure we link everybody into those sort
• 55:10
  of things. Your overall take homes for the episode though. Yeah. So
• 55:15
  although this effect, the bystander effect, it can be observed in certain circumstances,
• 55:20
  it's just it's more complicated than it seems. That it's not just the
• 55:23
  number of people. That there are a lot of other factors to consider and
• 55:25
  including those personal factors, and the examples seem to be relatively rare where it
• 55:32
  really exists, and that the primary variable seems to be just the number of
• 55:37
  people. And the opposite of this has happened in many instances as well,
• 55:42
  where you get some of that heroic effect from some people, and then the
• 55:45
  last thing is just that And as I sort of mentioned, the psychological experience
• 55:49
  of each person is important when we're trying to understand how someone makes a decision
• 55:53
  in that type of situation and how the circumstances of that event is going to
• 56:00
  be perceived and related to by you as a bystander and the other people that
• 56:05
  are around you. Perfect. Cool. So that is our episode, right,
• 56:10
  Yeah, that's what we had to say about that. Let's listen to
• 56:19
  some ads and then we'll be back with an update about bystander effect. Okay,
• 56:31
  Shane, let's talk about this thing that you found called pluralistic ignorance.
• 56:36
  So in the episode, you guys talked about this briefly. It was from
• 56:38
  Zambardo and some folks, and so sure, I wanted to kind of see
• 56:43
  if people were discussing this, and apparently there are some new studies on this,
• 56:46
  which I thought was really cool. As we mentioned in the episode,
• 56:50
  pluralistic ignorance was the kind of the new term they were trying to use for
• 56:53
  bystander effect. But Sergeant Newman in twenty twenty one actually conducted a scoping review,
• 56:58
  which is different than meta analysis. I learned recently. Cool one day,
• 57:01
  we'll have to talk about those. And so they dove into work being
• 57:06
  done on this pluralistic ignorance topic. So over twenty years, they found sixty
• 57:09
  articles that had been published on a topic. They found that across those topics,
• 57:13
  though there were some variation in measurement, variation in topics that were assessed
• 57:16
  and variations in measurement and methods of assessing. So basically what they said was
• 57:22
  they are a very long way from turning this into an actual theory or study
• 57:27
  or a topic within psychology that's like more formalized and more structured. Yeah,
• 57:31
  so many studies are like nobody's ever done it this way before, and that
• 57:36
  can be useful, but also like, can we replicate the things that have
• 57:38
  been done before so that we confront in those results, because that also is
• 57:43
  important. Multiple ways to go about that. Yeah. Desuza and Schmeider,
• 57:46
  that's a fun name. In twenty twenty two basically examined the perception that men
• 57:52
  do not intervene due to pluralistic ignorance. They found them most often people underestimate
• 57:57
  men's private perspectives and thoughts about a subt and that misunderstanding can actually reduce allyship.
• 58:02
  But they also found that men who scored high on masculine skills were also
• 58:07
  less likely to engage in aship behaviors toward women. So you know, the
• 58:12
  in cell community not particularly helpful in these types of situations, like not even
• 58:16
  close. So basically, in short, what that says is like men want
• 58:20
  to help, they want to jump in, but because people underestimate how they
• 58:23
  think about it, or they maybe have some perceptions on it and belief systems
• 58:27
  like maybe prevents them from intervening in certain situations. But those who are like
• 58:30
  more masculine, like the andrew Tates of the world, are less likely to
• 58:34
  intervene and help women on any level. So that's kind of what we discovered
• 58:37
  there, got it, got it's got it? Yeah, that's fun.
• 58:42
  Let's talk about the hero effect. There are very few terms that actually describe
• 58:45
  what people do when they jump into action like you. Like when I was
• 58:49
  kind of going into the research, I found terms like heroism, bystander,
• 58:52
  intervention effect, altruism. They were all used to describe actions of others and
• 58:57
  how they intervene. As an example, what they did talk about from Lathrop
• 59:00
  in nineteen ninety eight was they looked at locus of control as a primary factor
• 59:05
  that led to helping behavior. Basically, what they were saying was that somebody
• 59:08
  had the inner belief that one could intervene and that was a driving factor for
• 59:15
  wanting to intervene. So basically it had to do with more beliefs and attitudes
• 59:19
  than it did with actual environmental circumstances or contexts. Yeah. Perfect, Yeah,
• 59:22
  good way to say that, because I don't actually think we've talked much
• 59:25
  about locus of control on this podcast, but it is a concept that's actually
• 59:30
  very important in the philosophy of psychology, understanding where are the factors, where
• 59:36
  are the influencing variables that contribute to how someone behaves? Right. Yeah,
• 59:42
  you could view the locusts and the location of those variables being internally motivated or
• 59:47
  external, or some combination of those things. Most people like to sit on
• 59:51
  the middle and say, well, it's got to be a combination because that
• 59:53
  splits the difference between these two ideas, And there's a whole fallacy about like
• 59:59
  being in the middle of things as being an appropriate logical position to take.
• 1:00:02
  We're not going to go into that, but point being in this case,
• 1:00:05
  as you were saying, is whether the locus of whether someone feels for themselves,
• 1:00:08
  whether they feel like it's within their power or not, is sort of
• 1:00:13
  another way of thinking about that. Levin phil Pott Cavalenko in twenty nineteen found
• 1:00:19
  that the issue of the bystander effect doesn't always hold true in circumstances whether are
• 1:00:23
  violent or dangerous emergencies, which is very important in something that we did talk
• 1:00:27
  about in this episode that you will have just heard. Simply put, it
• 1:00:30
  is not consistent enough in these situations to cite the bystander effect as a primary
• 1:00:36
  barrier to intervention, because there are just there are times when people do,
• 1:00:40
  as you said, this sort of hero thing. People jump into action,
• 1:00:44
  even for a stranger. It depends on the circumstances, the situation, the
• 1:00:46
  context, the people who are there, the relationships to one another, what's
• 1:00:50
  going on, the relative perspective of control or authority or what have you.
• 1:00:54
  There's lots of things, but just saying that, like that particular effect being
• 1:00:59
  a thing doesn't account for what happens in these situations consistently enough for us to
• 1:01:04
  use it as a description of what happens right exactly. And there were several
• 1:01:08
  examples in the episode where he talked about where the man on the subway had
• 1:01:12
  had a seizure and the person jumped in despite there being hundreds of people jumped
• 1:01:16
  in to protect that person, and like, there are lots of examples of
• 1:01:20
  that happening. There was I think one study that said, like in a
• 1:01:22
  situation where there are nine to ten bystanders, like observers, at least one
• 1:01:27
  person in that group will intervene. That's something that you kind of see pretty
• 1:01:30
  consistently. I've seen that in a couple of different studies too, got it.
• 1:01:32
  There are also another very important factor here that we talked about in this
• 1:01:36
  discussion, and again that we need to bring up, which is that the
• 1:01:38
  bystander effect is situated around a very sort of western centric American idea of how
• 1:01:45
  people behave in crowds. But America does not represent how all people behave in
• 1:01:51
  the entire world and these social cultural situations, and so in a discussion around
• 1:01:55
  stranger relationships in China, there tends to be a great deal suspicion, So
• 1:02:00
  the emergency itself is not immediately cited as an emergency because of this sort of
• 1:02:05
  overall general suspicion toward others. Right, So, like to kind of put
• 1:02:08
  it in perspective in kind of comparing contrast, like in the United States,
• 1:02:13
  the bystander effect is more so somebody else will do it, so I don't
• 1:02:16
  need to, right, Like, That's kind of what the kind of the
• 1:02:20
  flavor of bystander effect is here. But in China, they're saying, I'm
• 1:02:23
  not going to intervene because that's probably a trick. I don't know those people.
• 1:02:27
  They're trying to like dupe me or get me into a bad situation.
• 1:02:30
  So, like there is a different kind of motivation and perspective for why people
• 1:02:34
  avoid intervening in those situations. And I mean on that it's important to point
• 1:02:37
  out that I think in the United States that is something that has shifted over
• 1:02:40
  time because people have used emergency situations to lure victims. Yeah, Ted Bundy
• 1:02:46
  very famously would act as if he needed help and then someone would not bystander
• 1:02:52
  effect come in to help him, and that's how he would apprehend some of
• 1:02:54
  his victims. Right now, in those cases, most of them were not
• 1:02:58
  in a crowd. That's part of why it work. But nevertheless, like
• 1:03:01
  people have specifically essentially hoodwinked people by feigning these emergency accident type situations and so
• 1:03:10
  people start to become suspicious of it. And it's terrible that we are that
• 1:03:14
  way, that that has happened because people have sort of ruined what social cooperation
• 1:03:20
  we may have had in some of the situations. And it's not ubiquitous,
• 1:03:22
  but it has happened, So I think people have wised up to that a
• 1:03:24
  little bit, right, absolutely, now. Some Indian researchers, specifically Ashy's
• 1:03:29
  Nandy notes that due to a quote increased brutalization of society, it's actually led
• 1:03:35
  to a cultural shift from choosing to help others and moving toward more isolationist perspective.
• 1:03:38
  So basically, as things get worse as a society, and this is
• 1:03:42
  specific to India, they were saying that in this particular area, that kind
• 1:03:46
  of living is so brutal and so difficult that helping others is not on the
• 1:03:52
  minds or of interest for other people. So they're less likely to intervene because
• 1:03:57
  they're just dealing with such harsh circumstances and something spaces got it, Okay,
• 1:04:01
  some interesting things. The term bystander effect also refers to the ability of cells
• 1:04:06
  affected by a radiation to convey manifestations of damage to other cells not directly targeted
• 1:04:12
  for radiation. That was a direct quote. Basically, if a cell is
• 1:04:15
  damaged through radiation, it can communicate to other non damage cells the same damage
• 1:04:20
  that they have. This is partially how radiation treatment works for cancer treatment.
• 1:04:25
  Right in a sense, for all of our microbiologist friends listeners out there,
• 1:04:30
  and maybe med students oncology med students perhaps, Yeah, you may have heard
• 1:04:35
  that term differently than how we use it today. Yeah, essentially, like
• 1:04:40
  the way that I understand it. And of course this is a psychology podcast,
• 1:04:43
  not a noncology podcast. But my understanding is you take one cell,
• 1:04:46
  you radiate it, and that cell turns to all the cells around it and
• 1:04:49
  goes, you're damage too, and the other cells around it go ah,
• 1:04:53
  damn it. That's how it breaks down the tumor. Essentially, is like
• 1:04:57
  you isolate singular cells inside the tumor and then those else just tell everybody else
• 1:05:00
  that they're broken, and then break down the tumor. So it's like a
• 1:05:02
  Trojan horse Oprah like and you get a yeah, yeah, exactly, that's
• 1:05:09
  exactly what it does. I mean, that's the way I read it,
• 1:05:11
  and that's what the that's what the diagram said. The diagram was really helpful
• 1:05:14
  for understanding too. Pictures are really helpful for sure, not so helpful in
• 1:05:18
  podcast audio medium. Yeah, yeah, that's so much. You can google
• 1:05:23
  it there you go. Yeah, or maybe one day we'll do braincast.
• 1:05:26
  This will be great. That sounds like fun. Yeah, all right,
• 1:05:29
  I think that's what we have to say on following up on this discussion of
• 1:05:32
  the bystander effect. Anything else that you need to add before we move on
• 1:05:35
  to our recommendations, Shane, I think that there's not been much advancement on
• 1:05:40
  the topic in five years or so, so I think we're okay, fair
• 1:05:43
  enough well, as always, thank you to my previous co host, Ryan
• 1:05:46
  for recording that. Thank you for recording with me today, Shane. Of
• 1:05:49
  course, thank you to my amazing team Justin as our audio engineer and producer.
• 1:05:54
  Emma Wilson is our social media coordinator, and then are writing in fact
• 1:05:57
  checking for Shane and myself, And of course, thank you so much for
• 1:06:00
  listening. If you like to support what we've done, you can join us
• 1:06:02
  on Patreon, leave a rating and review, subscribe, buy some merch from
• 1:06:05
  our merch store. Maybe we'll do some kind of Black Friday sale type thing.
• 1:06:11
  Have a really awesome and happy holidays. But and you can go tell
• 1:06:13
  all your friend members be like, hey, listen to this, check out
• 1:06:15
  this great podcast that you'll definitely love and maybe steer them away from the more
• 1:06:19
  politically oriented ones. If it's here, that they don't really lead in the
• 1:06:21
  same direction we do first and then and then they'll warm into them and then
• 1:06:26
  they'll they'll change their ways unlike that. But you know, here's open.
• 1:06:29
  It's worth a shot those people who have already joined us on Patreon and they
• 1:06:31
  get all kinds of perks and benefits from doing so. We'd like to say
• 1:06:34
  our deepest and most sincere thank you to Mike m Megan, Leila, Mike
• 1:06:40
  T, Justin Kam and Joshua, Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, Brian and
• 1:06:44
  Ashley. You guys, thank you. We just could not do this without
• 1:06:46
  you at all, Like, thank you so much for real, Yes,
• 1:06:49
  for real, for real. And with that, we do have some recommendations
• 1:06:55
  for you. We do as we always do, recommendations. Over the last
• 1:07:06
  couple of days, I and this is one reason I really like Spotify is
• 1:07:10
  because every now and again they'll give you this playlist. Then you go and
• 1:07:13
  you're like, every song on this playlist is a banger. It's all rippers,
• 1:07:15
  no skippers, as my friends say. And so one that came up
• 1:07:20
  and I was reminded that, like I really enjoy just really good hip hop
• 1:07:25
  and so an album that came up on that list was day Los Soul's three
• 1:07:29
  Feet High and Rising. So if you're not familiar with Daylas Soul, you've
• 1:07:32
  heard the songs, you know who they are, like because they were I
• 1:07:35
  feel like as pervasive as like Tribe called Quest and Nas and all those groups
• 1:07:41
  that were coming up in New York in like the early nineties and so like
• 1:07:43
  late eighties, early nineties and that that realm Da Loa Soul is a time
• 1:07:47
  warp when you listen to it, like when you listen three Feet High and
• 1:07:50
  Rising, It's just it's a perfect hip hop album. It's got all the
• 1:07:55
  really great samples, the real mellow beats. It's very good like skate record
• 1:07:59
  if you like to go like skateboarding. It kind of haves like a cruise
• 1:08:01
  type of feel to it. Yeah, go listen to it. It's a
• 1:08:03
  perfect hip hop album. Good to know, I will say, following up
• 1:08:08
  on you a recommendation for the Blank Win eighty two album. That was a
• 1:08:11
  great recommend been loving that album. It's so good. Second that Shane gives
• 1:08:15
  good music recommendations, listen to him, I try. I'm recommending A movie
• 1:08:18
  is a sort of recent one of those mystery spy movies Kenneth Branna. I
• 1:08:24
  think this is the third one of these they've done. He did like the
• 1:08:26
  Murder on the Orient Express remake. This one's called a Haunting in Venice,
• 1:08:30
  so it's got sort of a supernatural theme ish to it. It's really not
• 1:08:35
  as central to the mystery like it's kind of it's kind of the theme that
• 1:08:40
  carries the plot along a lot of critics didn't seem to care for it,
• 1:08:44
  but they wrote interesting things in the reviews that were like they give it like
• 1:08:48
  a six out of ten and said this was great. I hope they make
• 1:08:50
  another one, which confused me others who didn't like how Kenneth Branna portrayed the
• 1:08:56
  main character. I'm not familiar with the stories as well enough to have that
• 1:08:59
  criticism. So I think if you're just in it for like a good time
• 1:09:01
  mystery, that's like well executed, well shot, well acted, good script.
• 1:09:05
  I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun, and I think most
• 1:09:08
  people will too. Unless you're a critic, maybe you won't enjoy it,
• 1:09:11
  but I think most normal people who aren't looking out for that sort of thing,
• 1:09:15
  we'll find a lot of fun and enjoyment. In this so you can
• 1:09:17
  check out a hunting in Venice and then Shane's recommendation day La Soul, three
• 1:09:21
  feet High and rising. Yeah yeah, those my recommendations. I love it.
• 1:09:27
  Anything else that you liked to add or anything that we need to say
• 1:09:30
  before we wrap this up, I think that about covers it cool. All
• 1:09:32
  right, thanks so much for listening. This is Abraham and this is Shane.
• 1:09:35
  We're out to yet you've been listening to Why We Do what we do.
• 1:09:41
  You can learn more about this and other episodes by going to WWD WWD
• 1:09:45
  podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day