Why do some people get involved and others don't?

New Zealand woman Lucy Knight paid a price to intervene



Brave intervention: Lucy Knight was prepared to put her own health and safety at risk to rescue a fellow citizen who was a victim of crime. She paid a huge price with a long journey back to reasonable health.

Many would have to take their hat off to New Zealand woman Lucy Knight who stepped in to help a crime victim.

See her story here, which was televised on TVNZ's TV 1 Sunday programme: http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/lucy-knight-i-haven-t-forgiven-my-attacker-yet-6260107?autoStart=true

But what makes some people get involved and others stay out of it?

Aeon magazine ran this article about bystander helpful and unhelpfulness. See the full article here: http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/how-we-can-get-bystanders-to-help-victims-of-crime/

Following some horrific crimes - so horrific in fact, that the work of psychologists Darley and Latané couldn’t really account for the phenomenon of unhelpfulness in full.

Why, in the face of such devastating violence, were otherwise ‘good people’ looking the other way?

One issue worth exploring was the long-standing idea, perpetuated by the Genovese story (where a bar manager was brutally assaulted and murdered), that big cities breed apathy, even callousness.

The theory turns out to be flawed – city size played a role, but not the most important one.

Robert Levine, a social psychologist at California State University, Fresno, has evaluated ‘helping behaviours’ in cities all over the world.

In each city, Levine and his team have run a series of experiments in which bystanders have the opportunity to help or not help a stranger.

In one experiment, for example, researchers feigned a leg injury and dropped a large pile of magazines in view of a passing pedestrian, visibly struggling to bend over and pick them up.
In another, researchers feigned blindness at a street crossing, held out their cane and awaited assistance. Still other experiments were simpler – researchers dropped pens or stamped-addressed envelopes and tracked whether a bystander tried to return the pen or mail the envelope.

Results challenge the long-standing assumption that big, anonymous cities are destined to be full of unhelpful people.

In his 1994 paper on helping behaviours in 36 cities in the US, for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, some smaller places such as Paterson in New Jersey and Shreveport in Louisiana ranked low on Levine’s helping index.

Meanwhile, the most helpful city internationally, of the 23 he and colleagues studied for their 2001 paper for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, was Rio de Janeiro – population some 6.5 million today.
‘There were some big cities that were helpful, and some small cities that weren’t helpful,’ says Levine.
‘And that would indicate that there’s something in the culture – there’s this magical, mysterious part of the culture that breeds helpfulness. The opposite of what I was taught growing up in New York, which was not to help. That you’re not a bad person if you don’t help.’