I don’t know about you but I am disgusted by yet another example of the bystander effect.   Surveillance video from April 18^th made public this week reveals the full extent of our inhumanity as Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, a homeless man in Queens, was left dying in the street as people just walked on by.  Hugo was stabbed while trying to save a woman from an attacker.  Seven people walked by the dying man in the hour and twenty minutes it took for first responders to react. Most just gawked, one snapped a picture on his mobile phone, and one person even turned Hugo’s body over exposing his wounds before walking away.  Are you kidding me?  Are we that oblivious and unwilling to get involved that we leave a man to die in the street while walking on by?  Apparently we are.  Psychologists have labeled this the bystander effect.  What ever it is called it is disgusting.

The bystander effect is psychobabble for the phenomenon where individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present.  The theory is that the probability of help is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders.  The greater the number of bystanders the less likely any of them will help.  The bystander effect became widely recognized due to the Kitty Genovese case in 1964 that was sensationalized by an article in the New York Times (before YouTube and cell phone pictures).   The Genevese case is similar to Tale-Yax in that they both took place in Queens and involved a stabbing in full view of bystanders that chose not to act to help the victim.  In the Genevese case the perpetrator actually left the scene with Kitty unconscious and came back ten minutes later to finish the job while neighbors did nothing to help.  Amazing.  These cases are haunting and leave me thinking about the diffusion of responsibility within a crowd or within the community.

Does the bystander effect help explain why we have left so many of our urban centers in ruin as we drive by on the way to our suburban homes?  Does it explain why our public schools have been left to atrophy while we drive by to drop our kids off at a private or parochial school?  We know that our neighbors and neighborhood schools are in deep trouble.  We know they need our help.  Yet we drive by expecting and hoping that someone else will take care of it.  Someone else will not take care of it.  We can point at government leaders all we want but until we stop driving by and take some ownership for fixing the problems right in our own backyard these community issues will not be addressed.  We have bought in to the math. A diffusion of responsibility that lets us off the hook where the greater the number of bystanders the less likely that any of us will help.

Maybe social media can help us change the math. Social media platforms can help us create purposeful networks.  They make us aware of emergencies in real time and connect us across our silos enabling rapid action.  Is there a bystander effect in social media?  Are we more aware of what is going on around us yet less likely to act because we are just bystanders connected by social media?  Do we hide behind on-line anonymity to click by community challenges? I hope not.  We have the opportunity for self-organization and to put our social media networks to work on the real social challenges we face.  Don’t be a bystander.  Act.