Why do we decide not to help? The indifferent witness

Common sense dictates that rescue behaviors are instinctive in emergency situations. However, many people choose not to help. Why is this happening? Are they not very empathetic or indifferent to the suffering of others?

The decision tree to help or not to help

The decision to take part in an emergency situation is not just one, but a set of them. that interact and influence each other. Dispositional factors such as individual personality, the culture in which they live and the dehumanization of victims, among others, must also be taken into account.

However, when the individual considers helping or not helping, a series of decisions influence the result:

Notice the accident: depending on the context it can be more or less difficult, since a scream in the middle of a cafeteria attracts much more attention than in the middle of a crowd.Interpret the situation as an emergency: Sometimes you can witness an ambiguous event, in which you do not know very well whether there is a risk or not. In these cases it may happen that they do not help themselves for fear of making a mistake or taking unnecessary risks.Consider that one is responsible for helping the victim: For example, if a child is injured but his guardian is with him, the decision is usually not to intervene.Decide how best to help: many times indecision in this regard is what causes many people to decide not to help. Is it better to get in and stop the fight with knives or call the police? Risk your own safety or risk someone dying if the police don’t arrive in time?The very decision to help: after all the previous steps, only the raw decision remains, the one that drives you to jump into action.

However, this last decision can be negative even when the rest of the factors point to the opposite. Why is this happening? Social psychologists have described some of the factors that influence the final decision. We describe them in the following section.

Factors that influence the decision not to help

As said in the previous lines, even though everything may seem conducive to providing help, sometimes this decision is not made. Why not? The following reasons will shed a little more light on this.

Spread of responsibility

It appears that the number of people witnessing the emergency situation plays an important role in this decision. When only one person sees what happened, the responsibility falls solely on them; However, if there are several witnesses, it is distributed among them.

Need help or private dispute?

When the context of an emergency situation is interpreted as a conflict between related people – that is, private – there is a tendency to move away from it and let those people resolve it.

Besides, there is a tendency to interpret ambiguous situations in some sense that does not require their intervention. And not only that: when it is interpreted as private, we tend to think that it is less serious than if it were between strangers.

Cost analysis

Although it may sound a bit crude to hear, people also evaluate what it may cost them lend help. In emergency cases, personal costs and those of the victim are usually taken into account, so that:

The witness will be more likely to help when the costs to the victim of not helping are high and the personal cost of doing so is low. If the costs to the victim are going to be low, and the cost to the person helping is high, most likely it will not intervene. Between these two points, there are many other intermediate points, in which other variables also come into play, such as education, experience or the scale of values ​​itself.

Given a social inclination to not help in situations where it may be necessary, It is critical to know the reasons for this position. Although there may always arise an occasion in which helping may be worse than not doing so, fostering the attitude of helping among equals – and providing tools for this – is necessary to build an altruistic and aware society.

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