The Collective Bystander

Introduction

The public myth about passive bystanders originated 50 years ago with the case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman raped and murdered in New York. Reporters claimed 38 people witnessed the crime but did nothing to help her.

Background

Although the police case file later showed that some bystanders in fact had tried to help, the incident inspired decades of experimental studies trying to explain why bystanders in the presence of others remain inactive toward persons in need of help.

The Bystander Effect

While this ‘bystander effect’ is among the most replicated findings in the social sciences, recent video observations of real-life violent emergencies show that bystanders in groups are far from passive.

Program Overview

This Collective Bystander program aims to explain why and how bystanders take action to help in public emergencies. Utilizing state-of-the-art video analysis, the largest dataset of CCTV footage ever assembled (4,000 clips of emergencies in Cape Town and Amsterdam), and virtual reality experiments, it will advance an explanatory model that identifies the causal mechanisms that drive helping—a model generalizable beyond experimental settings and violent emergencies.

Scientific Contributions

The program breaks new scientific ground by:

1. Offering a theory that can explain why bystanders take collective action in real-life emergencies, instead of assuming that helping is an individual decision and responsibility.
2. Studying how helping happens, rather than focusing on the lack of helping or merely establishing whether bystanders help or not.
3. Providing insight into how the type of emergency influences helping behavior.
4. Elucidating the interactional mechanisms that prompt helping, moving beyond merely examining variables that correlate with helping.
5. Integrating the real-life validity of video observation with the causality-testing capacity of virtual reality experimentation.

Conclusion

In sum, the program will set a new research agenda that shifts the focus from individual inaction to collective action in explaining bystander helping.