Yue Yue and the Bystander Effect. Could This Have Been You?

I'm sure most of you would have heard the news about two-year-old Yue Yue who was struck by a van in China. Eighteen people walked past her body, and a truck even drove over her foot, before a garbage lady stopped to take a look at the body.  If you haven't then I suggest you read this before reading further.


"What has happened to our morality?" "Where are our hearts of sympathy?" "How come we could ever become even more cruel and hard-hearted than cold-blooded animals?" are questions that appeared in an article by Asia Times. If I read this a month ago, I would have been as shocked and disgusted as the rest of the world. However, after learning about the Bystander Effect in Social Psychology last year, I only feel disgust as I read this article.


The Bystander Effect: the phenomenon in which the greater the number of people present, the less likely people are to help a person in distress. I remember my psychology professor explaining to me that if I were to be stabbed or shot, to make sure I fall in front of one person and not 5 or 10. Reason being, the weight of responsibility (diffusion of responsibility) is distributed by the number of witnesses. If I fall in front of one person, he/she will feel 100% of the responsibility to get me some medical assistance.  If I fall in front of 10 people, each will only feel 10% of the responsibility and each will wait for the other person to make the first move to help, thus, the longer I would wait before I received help.  And this is exactly what happened to Yue Yue.


Now before you blame the fact that Yue Yue was in China as the reason why 18 people passed her before someone came to her rescue, this phenomenon occurs everywhere.  The most popular example used in psychology text books is that of Kitty Genovese, who on March 13, 1964, was murdered and raped outside her apartment in Queens, New York.  Despite 38 of her neighbours hearing her scream, no one came to her rescue.  The earliest record of anyone contacting the police about Kitty was thirty minutes after her death. 


As unbelievable as these stories are (and you may think, that you are the exception to this case), many people would behave the same if they were a witness in a similar situation. Therefore, the purpose of this blog post is to educate and raise awareness of this phenomenon, so that it will occur less. I hope that this little psychology lesson will put you less at risk of bystander apathy if you are in trouble, and that if others are in trouble, you will not hesitate to be of their assistance.

Side note: if you look up Bystander Effect on Wikipedia, I just noticed that someone has added Yue Yue as a notable example.