How do we avoid bystander apathy in an emergency?
I think it was the training I got when I worked on psychiatric wards that explains my tendency to check out people in crowds for signs of odd behavior. I look to see what might be coming, to catch the signs of escalating and dangerous behavior. On the night shift we made rounds, walking up and down the hall looking into every room every half hour or sometimes every 10 or 15 minutes to make sure everyone was still breathing and no one was hanging off the bed with a noose around the neck.
We were trained to observe people’s affect—tone of voice, posture, eye contact, and the content of their thoughts—to consider the context and assess the quality of a person’s thought, and to write down what they said whether it was in the emergency room in the middle of the night or the day room of the ward, to figure out someone’s needs. I’ve talked to people who were actively hallucinating to the point of shouting they were Jesus returned from the dead and someone who thought he was already dead. My job was to respond. I was one of several counselors who, when the call came for staff, stepped in to provide the control that a person couldn’t provide for themselves and that sometimes meant putting someone in four point restraints.
One night I sat awake in a chair in the room of a man on suicide watch, noting his every move. Over the couple of years I worked on locked and unlocked psychiatric wards I sat across the table from men and women who secretly cut their forearms with razors, a man who’d tried to hack off his arm with a hatchet and an adolescent boy who’d been brought in to the hospital because he was standing over the gas burner thinking about burning off his face.
For a couple of years in my twenties I was meeting people in crisis around the Bay State and what I learned, was not to panic when the shit hit the fan. And that’s not to say this come naturally or easily. We practiced how to deal with people who were out of control before anything ever happened. Years later I worked with someone who had been a leader in Outward Bound and her motto was something like this, “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Problems.” To say that disaster is around the corner these days is an understatement but there’s also no shortage of resources.
You can download applications for your smartphone from FEMA for “safety tips, interactive lists for storing your emergency kit and emergency meeting location information.” You can check out firstresponders.gov and be comforted by the fact that the Directorate of Science and Technology within the Department of Homeland Security is busy studying ways to detect bio hazards on the Red Line by releasing “nonviable (killed) B. subtilis spores.” You may also be happy to know that there’s an online course offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for doctors and nurses to learn how to “respond locally to mass casualties with potential radiological injury.”
Alternatively you might just be freaked out by considering all the potential dangers lurking in our world and it’s easy enough to succumb to the sadness of the bewildering atrocities we hear about every day. But if each of us were to realize and accept that before we ever face a crisis—we are the ones who have to take responsibility as best we can to do what we can—we’ll all be a lot better off.
There’s a famous case of a woman named Kitty Genovese who was brutally murdered in the late 1960s on a street of New York at night, as she screamed for help and no one responded. Shocked by the apparent cold hearted response of New Yorkers, psychologists looked into the why. Why did no one appear to be willing to help save Kitty from getting killed?
What researchers found was that people can essentially got lost in the crowd. It’s not so hard to think that someone else might be helping so why bother calling the police or an ambulance. Someone must have called already, the thinking goes, so why bother and it’s been called Bystander Apathy.
In a fascinating article published by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley, the authors discuss the Kitty Genovese case and other research on what makes some people get involved or not in a crisis. The authors of the article, Jason Marsh, a founding editor in chief of Greater Good, and a co-editor of two anthologies of Greater Good articles: The Compassionate Instinct (WW Norton, 2010) and Are We Born Racist? (Beacon Press, 2010) and Dacher Keltner, Ph.D, a founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, explain that research has shown that witnesses to the “Genovese murder may have seen other apartment lights go on, or seen each other in the windows, and assumed someone else would help. The end result is altruistic inertia . . . or something researchers have called ‘confusion of responsibility,’ where bystanders fail to help someone in distress because they don’t want to be mistaken for the cause of that distress.”
Compare the unfortunate but real threat of reluctance to get involved to help, to the ignorance and incompetence of recalling your partying days of getting blind drunk in New Orleans as former President Bush did following the destruction along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina when he cluelessly complimented the then head of FEMA, Michael Brown by telling him “You’re doing a heckuva’ job Brownie.” In one case, people don’t get involved because they’re afraid of making a mistake and in the other, the government made the mistake of waiting too long before getting involved. Too little too late is as bad as doing nothing at all.
So let’s not despair. Consider this. In the wake of the bombing in Boston, Northeastern University has begun a study “of how mobile phones are used for communication around emergencies. Study participants can download an app that “generates a survey that asks participants about how they were affected by events (e.g., Did they lose electricity during Sandy? How near the bombings were they?), their relationships to important contacts, as well as questions about their reliance on social and mainstream media.” To encourage participation the University “will donate $3 to One Fund Boston for every participant in the Boston study, and $3 to local food banks in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy.”
Here’s to all the dedicated first responders who cared enough to get involved in every emergency in recent memory, thank you. And to everyone who thinks there’s nothing they can do in an emergency, don’t panic, help is on the way and in fact, you are the help.
Read more on First Responders on The Good Life.
Image credit: lil’bear/Flickr
