The recent travails of British politician Boris Johnson shoved the bystander effect into the limelight, after neighbors alerted police to raised voices in his home.  Those neighbors were criticized by supporters of Johnson for interfering, but new research by the University of Copenhagen suggests that most people would do likewise.

The study explored whether people would intervene in a public fight to help the victim of aggression, and found that roughly 90% would do just that.  The findings emerged after the researchers examined video footage of 219 arguments or assaults conducted in Amsterdam, Lancaster and Cape Town.

“According to conventional wisdom, non-involvement is the default response of bystanders during public emergencies. Challenging this view, the current cross-national study of video data shows that intervention is the norm in actual aggressive conflicts. The fact that bystanders are much more active than we think is a positive and reassuring story for potential victims of violence and the public as a whole. We need to develop crime prevention efforts which build on the willingness of bystanders to intervene,” the authors explain.

Likely to intervene

The analysis found that bystanders had intervened in 91% of the incidents in the three locations, with this intervention including gesturing for the aggressor to calm down, consoling the victim or even physically pulling the aggressor away.  What’s more, this help was more likely to come when there were a lot of bystanders present.

“The most important question for the potential victim of a public assault is ‘will I receive help if needed?’ While having more people around may reduce an individual’s likelihood of helping (i.e., the bystander effect), it also provides a larger pool from which help-givers may be sourced,” the researchers say.

There appeared to be no apparent difference between the three locations, despite cities such as Cape Town having a poor reputation for safety.  The paper suggests that one’s perceived danger does not appear to be a factor in deciding whether to help or not, but rather the signal emanating from the conflict itself that marks it out as requiring intervention.

It provides a welcome contrast to the notion that we’re a ‘walk-on by society’ where everyone is so self-absorbed with their own affairs that they barely notice others, much less offer to help those in distress.