Examples of indifference: bystander effect and people starving

Bystander effect theory (a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present) finds new confirmations thanks to one of the last episode of indifference reported on many italian newspapers on June the 16th (Il Corriere della sera).

The fact took place in Naples on May the 26th: after a gunfight between different groups belonging to Camorra in the street near Montesanto underground stop a Romanian man was injured by mistake. The man, a Romanian player, was walking towards the underground station with his wife. After the shooting they run away in the direction of the station and the man died just at the entrance of the underground while people passed by without paying any attention or even escaping as if the man was a danger. The underground cameras recorded all the sequence of the event. The last video related to the death of the man is the most worrying and meaningful one I think. Watching it I had the strong impression of being in front of one of the videos which report experiments performed on bystander effect: a person who pretends of being sick in a street full of people and nobody who takes care. Unluckily this time it’s not just an experiment with actors aimed to study people’s reactions when someone is in the need of help. It’s reality, and I can add, a sad reality… And this is not a sentence of guilt towards all the people who enter the underground and didn’t take care of the man and his wife. I’m not so sure that in similar circumstances, i.e. after a street gunfight and in front of a people bleeding, I would behave in a different way. It’s just the result (and a very bad result) of the society in which we live: we are all too much concerned about our health and economic situation to care about others. It’s not new however: maybe the most famous confirmation of bystander effect can be traced back to 1964 when Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death by a serial rapist and murderer. According to newspaper accounts, the killing took place for at least a half an hour. The murderer attacked Ms. Genovese and stabbed her, but then fled the scene after attracting the attention of a neighbor. The killer then returned ten minutes later and finished the assault. Newspaper reports after Genovese’s death claimed that 38 witnesses watched the stabbings and failed to intervene or even contact the police.

So nothing new, maybe bystander effect is in some way part of human nature. However in a society characterized by globalization and strong differences between rich and poor countries the bystander effect and indifference in general can appear on a new scale.

Just one example which is quite impressive: UN agengy warns that a billion people worldwide are starving. “For millions of people in developing countries, eating the minimum amount of food every day to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream,” said the FAO’s assistant director general, Hafez Ghanem. “The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality.” The situation was made worse because of the rising of prices and the fact that urgency over food crisis got lost amid credit crunch. According to Reuters Italia countries belonging to G8 didn’t honour their financial commitments as arranged in Scotland during a summit in 2005. And Italy is among the countries which is far under the target as far as helps are concerned.

Maybe all countries are behaving according to self interest and bystander effect: the common crisis in some way authorizes not to spend too much attention on problems different from internal ones and the effect is made worse thanks to the fact that all countries are doing in the same way so we can ignore people starving without the risk of causing bad impression.

One of the most worrying aspect is that political powers divert people’s attention on foreign problems such as people starving when it is not useful to win some electoral competition. And so also from people point of view indifference can’t be avoided: we are concerned about the risks and criminality caused by immigrants but at the same time we don’t question our responsibilities in the immigration phenomenon. We are used to our habits and don’t think even more that we are using too many resources if compared to people in other less lucky countries. Some videos on yuotube are quite impressive especially when they point out that in order to eat a beef we use the same amount of water and grain that would feed about 20 people. Maybe the proposal of becoming vegetarian in order to solve all the problems related to people starving is a bit extreme… but each and everyone of us can for sure do something… it’s just a question of being aware and find the will.

Elisa Camozzi