MR. BROOKS: If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense. You have a script to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene. If--there's been a ton of research on this. They say people, they ask people, "If you saw something cruel, if you saw racism and sexism, will you intervene?" Then they hire actors, and they put it right in front of them. People do not intervene. It's called the bystander effect. It happens again and again, people don't intervene. That's why we need these scripts to remind people how, how evil can be all around.
The bystander effect was studied after the infamous Kitty Genovese murder in Queens in 1964 (more like 50 than 30 years ago) when 38 "bystanders" were alleged to have done nothing in response to Genovese's cries for help.
While the Genovese murder story turned about to be more apocryphal than revealing, the "bystander effect" has been studied and, not surprisingly, Brooks misunderstands it or deliberately misstates its thesis. In the Penn State situation, the person who claimed to have witnessed the sexual assault, McQuery, was alone. The "bystander effect" posits that:
These experiments virtually always find that the presence of others inhibits helping, often by a large margin. [. . .] There are, in fact, many reasons why bystanders in groups fail to act in emergency situations, but social psychologists have focused most of their attention on two major factors. According to a basic principle of social influence, bystanders monitor the reactions of other people in an emergency situation to see if others think that it is necessary to intervene. Since everyone is doing exactly the same thing (nothing), they all conclude from the inaction of others that help is not needed. This is an example of pluralistic ignorance or social proof. The other major obstacle to intervention is known as diffusion of responsibility. This occurs when observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so each individual feels less responsible and refrains from doing anything.
There is a lot to be said about what happened at Penn State. None of it is related to the bystander theory.
A more apt application of "bystander theory" is to the "30 0r 40 years" of Republicans and conservatives like David Brooks rationalizing and justifying the growing levels of income inequality in the United States. In a later post, I'll take up that issue.
Speaking for me only
