Do People Suck?

Mike at Crime & Federalism says “Yes, they do.”

His evidence is pretty compelling: The story of a 78-year-old man being hit by a car and left lying in the street as people walk on by. (You can click to see security video of the hit-and-run. It’s a little shocking.)

A 78-year-old man is tossed like a rag doll by a hit-and-run driver and lies motionless on a busy city street as car after car goes by. Pedestrians gawk but appear to do nothing. One driver stops briefly but then pulls back into traffic. A man on a scooter slowly circles the victim before zipping away.

The chilling scene — captured on video by a streetlight surveillance camera — has touched off a round of soul-searching in Hartford, with the capital city’s biggest newspaper blaring “SO INHUMANE” on the front page and the police chief lamenting: “We no longer have a moral compass.”

It sounds like another shocking case of people doing nothing to help someone in trouble. We hear about these things every once in a while, and then all the pundits start ranting about indifference, cowardice, and the shocking selfishness of our times.

I don’t believe it.

Most of these cases have more nuance to them than the first reports—and subsequent rants—reveal. In this case, for example, a passing police car stopped at the scene a minute and a half after the incident. So when we read that nobody did anything to help, it really means that nobody did anything in the first 90 seconds.

Stop right here and ask yourself: What would you do? Your first reaction is probably that you’d help the guy. Great. Now how would you do that? Exactly what would be the first thing you do to help the guy? Would you walk up to him? Why? What will you do when you get there? Unless you have the training, you probably have no idea how to treat someone with such severe injuries.

From the time you read “Stop right here” at the beginning of the last paragraph has probably been about 10 seconds. You have 80 more seconds to figure out what to do. Think about it.

Unless you have emergency medical training, the most obvious thing to do is to call 911 and tell the dispatcher what happened. As it happens, the Hartford 911 center got four calls about the hit-and-run within 60 seconds.

About the only other thing an untrained person could do is block traffic so the poor guy doesn’t get hit again. Since, in fact, he didn’t get hit again, perhaps this wasn’t necessary in the time frame.

Now let’s back up a bit and think about the mental state of the witnesses. Before they could respond to the accident, they had to recognize it as an accident. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

One night a few years ago, a friend of mine was driving along the street when he saw one guy shoot another guy. His only thought at the time was “That was rude!” It wasn’t until he’d driven on another couple of minutes that he really understood what it was he had seen and realized he needed to talk to the police.

My friend is not alone in this. Plenty of people have witnessed robberies, rapes, and murders and not quite recognized what was going on. It’s not something you’re used to seeing, it’s not something you expect to see, so it takes a little time to sink in.

And that’s only if you actually see the accident. Anybody who wasn’t watching the street as the accident happened only heard a crashing noise, maybe a scream or two, and when they looked around there was a guy collapsed in the street. It takes a few precious seconds of mental work to figure out that the guy must have just been struck by a car.

Witnesses to the accident could also have been hampered by their own body’s reaction. Any sudden change in the environment—especially if it appears violent or threatening—can trigger the human flight-or-fight reflex: Chemicals pour into the bloodstream to prepare the body and brain for a life or death struggle, making the body faster and stronger.

These temporary superpowers come at a price, however: People get stupid. The theory is that the brain cuts the higher reasoning centers out of the decision-making process because they’re too slow. People running in this mode can perform learned behavior very quickly—running, fighting, even driving a car—but they lose most of their ability to adapt to novel situations. Never having seen a hit-and-run accident before, they are literally unable to think about it clearly.

(Those of us sitting back and watching the whole thing on video don’t have that problem. We can can think clearly about the situation, and we can make unrealistically harsh judgments about the people who actually experienced it.)

Finally, there are the effects of crowd psychology to consider. When people in a crowd encounter something new, they look to other members of the crowd for cues to proper behavior. It’s harder to overcome your personal confusion and help an accident victim if nobody else has stepped forward to help. In the video of the scene, you can see a group of people taking hesitant steps toward the victim, each step presumably reinforcing their sense that they’re doing the right thing.

On the other hand, the presence of a crowd tends to diminish a sense of personal responsibility. Most people at the accident scene have no clue how to help the victim, so they wait for someone to step forward and take charge. From the television interviews, we know that people at the accident scene were standing around horrified that no one was helping that poor man lying in the street, not realizing that they themselves were the only help available. Eventually, people realize what’s going on, and the spell breaks.

I can’t say for sure why people at the scene did what they did, but I think we should cut them some slack for the inability of this crowd of strangers to quickly organize a response to an unusual and frightening situation.