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Would you intervene if you saw somebody being attacked?

In 1964 a 28-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in the street in Queens, New York. There were reputed to be 38 people who witnessed the attack, which lasted for more than half an hour, but nobody came to her aid.

The event entered the literature of psychology as the “bystander effect”, the theory being that people feel less responsibility to help strangers in trouble if there are plenty of other people in the area. There may also be the feeling that if nobody else is doing anything, the situation cannot be all that serious.

However, this theory has been questioned after research that has been done in the UK, The Netherlands and South Africa. This has shown that, in similar situations, people do intervene in 90% of cases. Sometimes only one person does so, but quite often more than one person tries to help.

The researchers also found that people are more likely to intervene the higher the number of other bystanders, which goes dead against the earlier theory. There was little difference as between occurrences in the three countries.

It would appear that people have a natural inclination to help others in trouble, which is reassuring!

  • Question of

    Would you intervene if you saw somebody being attacked?

    • Yes
    • No
  • Question of

    Would you be more likely to intervene if there were two other people with you?

    • Yes
    • No
  • Question of

    Would you be more likely to intervene if there were ten people with you?

    • Yes
    • No
  • Question of

    Would you be less likely to intervene if the attacker had a knife?

    • Yes
    • No
  • Question of

    Would you be less likely to intervene if the attacker had a gun?

    • Yes
    • No

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What do you think?

15 Points

Written by Indexer

10 Comments

  1. It’s an interesting question and I do have the answer for me. It might be interesting to know what others think I would do. So tell me, do you think I would jump in head first or call the police?

  2. I would call the police immediately. These days even if I wanted to help I could either make the situation worse or wind up being killed myself but I would not just stand around and watch. I am the one who always has said when I hear about people behaving badly that I would like to knock them on the head with a skillet. Perhaps I should start carrying a skillet with me.

      • With the police, you never know but what else can be done is very difficult to decide. You don’t want the victim to be killed and you certainly don’t want to become the second victim. The only other thing that just came to mind was to open my mouth and scream at the top of my lungs perhaps frightening away the attacker.

  3. It depends on the situation. If two women or if two men are fighting each other, then I am not jumping in. If it’s a guy hitting a woman, then I’m jumping in no matter what.

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