Passerby Effect

I have seen few things in my life that cause me to wonder about our common humanity more than what happened in China last week. A two year old toddler, carelessly run down by a van in a busy marketplace. Not only did the driver just drive off and leave little Yueyue to die, 18 people passed by in the next 6 minutes and none of them made any effort whatsoever to help that poor and precious little girl laying there suffering and dying. A trash collector finally pulled her to the side of the road (how ironic is that!) but she died later in hospital.

People were quick to condemn China as a reprobate society unlike our own, pointing to things like the ‘culture of fear left over from the Cultural Revolution’, or the authoritarian state, or the newly enjoyed economics and rampant materialism. There may be some truth to those observations but to suggest that we are somehow substantively different is to be in denial. Similar types of incidents have occurred elsewhere including here in North America.

In April of last year, you may recall hearing on the news about a 31 year old homeless man named Hugo Tale-Yax who was walking down a street in Queen’s, N.Y. at 6:00 AM when he came upon a woman being threatened by a man with a knife. He came to the woman’s rescue only to have the attacker turn on him stabbing him several times. Not only did the assailant then flee but so did the woman! And then, as the surveillance video shows, more than two dozen people, walked by the wounded man as he laid there holding his stomach, groaning in pain. More than one person stopped and rolled him over to see how badly he was wounded and one person even took a picture! But no one helped. Eventually, someone did stop and called an ambulance. But more than two dozen people and 80 minutes had passed by and it was too late for Mr. Tale-Yax who died shortly afterward.

In commenting on little Yueyue’s tragic end, people have been referring to the ‘bystander effect’ but the ‘bystander effect’ doesn’t really apply either in her case or in Hugo’s. The ‘bystander effect’ suggests that the likelihood of anyone helping someone in need drops as the number of ‘bystanders’ rises. It is believed that the numbers create a kind of ‘diffusion of responsibility’. But, in both of the above cases, there were no crowds standing and watching. They were passers by who had nothing but their own conscience to guide them. There was no opportunity for a ‘diffusion of responsibility’, only an absence of it altogether! And such was also the case when Jesus, who was the first one on record to profile the ‘Passerby Effect’, reported on the case of the Good Samaritan (See Luke 10:25-37)

In each of these cases - Yueyue, Hugo, and the unnamed man on the Jericho road so many years ago - people didn’t stand there in a crowd, frozen in some kind of state of ‘diffused responsibility’ (not that this is acceptable either). One by one, they walked by … around … over… the helpless victim lying there in pain, without lifting even one finger to offer any kind of help or care. So, if the ‘Bystander Effect’ is attributable to ‘diffused responsibility’, how do we explain this?

It’s incomprehensible. All I can say is, may God deliver me and anyone who reads this from that kind of hard-heartedness.