[By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

"AS an 87-year-old man lay on a downtown street yesterday morning, having fallen and bleeding from the head, a crowd gathered during the 15 or so minutes it took for an ambulance to arrive. Among the 20-plus Chinese onlookers, some were taking pictures with their phones and sending the photos to their micro-blog." ("Upset crowd tries to help sick man," Shanghai Daily, August 11)

This unfortunate incident confirmed the research conducted by Latane and Darley that the greater the number of people witnessing an event when help is needed, the less likely it is that any one person will render help. This phenomenon is termed the diffusion of responsibility or bystander effect.

This sad situation has been proven many times through numerous experiments conducted by social psychologists. It is the tendency for witnesses to feel that responsibility for acting is shared or diffused when others are present.

An even more tragic incident happened in October 2011, at a market in Foshan in South China's Guangdong Province. A toddler was first struck by a van, then run over by another vehicle. A surveillance camera showed that over seven minutes, 18 people walked by the dying child and made no effort to help. (Shanghai Daily, August 8.)

In the aforementioned research experiment, students sat in individual cubicles participating in a discussion on college life. Suddenly one student had a seizure and cried for help. It was proven that if people believe that they are the only ones listening to a student having a seizure, 85 percent will render help within 60 seconds. After 150 seconds, 100 percent of the research participants, who thought that they were the only witnesses, offered help. In contrast, only 62 percent offered assistance within 60 seconds when they knew there was one other witness.

Is help always available in single witness situation? Not necessarily. John Darley and Daniel Batson demonstrated in one experiment using seminary students (among the most altruistic young people) to prove that if one is in a time-constraint situation, rendering help had a lowered priority. Sixty-three percent of those who were not in a hurry stopped to render assistance compared with only 10 percent who were hurrying to appointments. Many of the hurrying seminary students did not even notice a man groaning in the doorway.

In a well-publicized case (The Straits Times, September 26, 2004), a wine and coffee trader named Wong slipped and fell in the rain on the way to the gymnasium. He was lying in great pain for 20 minutes, before help came, at Singapore's premier golf club. He recalled seeing three cars slowing down in front of him and then driving away. Another club member, a lady, simply parked her car beside the man in pain, locked it and walked off toward the tennis center.

It took a pool attendant named Rahim, who happened to see the man, to pick the man up and take him to the pool reception area. The man's fall displaced a spinal disc, resulting in the man's inability to move his arms. It seemed the well-heeled members had many appointments on their minds.

According to some experts, a person who is providing assistance may even be seen by late-arriving onlookers as the possible source of the harm that befell the victim. They call this phenomenon "confusion of responsibility." Apparently this seems to be the cases that were recently reported in China.

As reported by Shanghai Daily on August 10, a fishmonger in Hunan Province committed suicide when the elderly woman he helped accused him of knocking her down, and repeatedly demanded compensation, as did others who appeared to be thugs.

So, in view of the various barriers to offering help, if a victim were to suddenly collapse along a pedestrian walkway, would there be no help? I do not believe this will happen. There will be, among the thousands milling around the shops, some people with pro-active social tendencies to render assistance, just like Lenny Skutnik, who in January 1982 dived into the freezing Potomac River and swam 30 meters to rescue a drowning victim of a plane crash -"I just did what I had to do," said the office clerk in Washington, DC.

Tseng Tan is a senior HR consultant in Singapore. His e-mail: teestan@starhub.net.sg. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.

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