Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” And though it’s a not completely related, it reminded me of a discussion I had with a sociology masters student a while ago.

She mentioned she was working on a study analyzing the circumstances of when a bystander will come to the aid of a victim. I was intrigued since I don’t feel that the conventional explanation for the Bystander Effect (diffusion of responsibility) adequately explains the phenomena.

It turns out that her research wasn’t about the number of bystanders, but the type of crime. The findings showed that bystanders statistically helped more often when the victim screams, “Help, there’s a fire!” as opposed to “Help, I’m being attacked.”

Her conclusion is that people are “horribly selfish”: if there’s a fire, they come running to help because they are afraid that their possessions are at risk. But in the case of a person being attacked, they just don’t care.

Granted I haven’t seen the raw data or the exact analysis, but I feel the conclusion is wrong. While you could argue that there are a small amount of people for whom selfishness is a factor, I doubt it would be the primary factor.

I think it’s about risk. Interfering with any situation has some degree of risk. In the case of the fire, the risk is relatively low. I generally know what to do in this case: help people move away, call the fire department, etc. By making myself available to help, I take very little personal risk.

In the case of someone being attacked, let’s say I go help… what if the attacker has a gun or a knife, or is much bigger and stronger than me? There’s not much I can do and I might even make things worse. Just by going to investigate I could get myself killed. It seems the most reasonable thing to do is call the police and stay away.

Also, consider if the experiment is using real crime data, then you have the risk of comparing apples and oranges. Violent attacks tend to happen in bad neighborhoods, while fires are more indiscriminate and could be anywhere. I imagine that people in bad neighborhoods are less likely to help random strangers regardless of circumstance, compared to people in a nice neighborhood. That fact alone could completely throw off your data.

Anyway, I wish I could find the study to see the details. But it seems weird that the student and her advisor would jump to such a strange conclusion. I would say that they are doing it on purpose to increase the chance of their findings being published, but I shouldn’t attribute malice to something that can be explained by stupidity. :-)