Note this horrendous accident: Hit-run case shocks China – and the world

A two-year-old girl who was struck by a vehicle in a hit-and-run accident in China was ignored by more than a dozen passers-by as she lay critically injured on the road.

[…]

It is not until seven minutes later that a street cleaner, later identified as 58-year-old Chen Xianmei, comes to the girl’s aid and lifts her from the road, calling for help.

Terrible. The mechanism involved is called “social proof” in social psychology: If a human doesn’t know what to do in a certain situation, they subconsciously check what people around them are doing – in general, following what they do works well in a society.

However, it can also backfire – and we most commonly hear about such cases in relation to accidents, assaults and murders – and in the past it’s been said that big cities or humanity in general have gone apathetic towards things and therefore don’t respond – but that’s not correct.

What happens is that the people you look around at don’t know what to do either and are themselves checking around them, consequentially you get a collective bad judgement: they don’t see others act, and conclude that it mustn’t be the thing to do.

So how has the “apathy hypothesis” been proven wrong? Social Psychology professor Robert Cialdini was himself in a car accident. He pointed at and addressed a specific person in the crowd “you, with the blue jacket, call an ambulance”, “you, with the red shirt, check on the driver in the other car.” And then lots of other people also did other useful things. Social proof did its positive thing.

When you understand this, you realise that even just calling out “please help me” generically may not work. You must address a specific individual. A valuable and possibly life-saving lesson.

Of course in the case of this accident it required a bystander to break the negative effect. But it’s very important to realise that it’s not apathy that causes the problem.