Tag Archives: social proof

Not Apathy – How to make Social Proof work

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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.

Religious misdirection on bumpersticker

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I don’t expect bumperstickers to be of the highest journalistic caliber. That said, I found one spotted yesterday a bit irky. I was driving at the time so I couldn’t take a pic… from memory, it went something like this:

“Dear God, why is there so much violence in our schools? Signed, a concerned student.”
“Dear concerned student, I’m not allowed in schools. Signed, God.”

I reckon that’s misrepresenting the issues more than a little bit, as well as not having a foundation in fact. Australia has plenty of religious schools, in particular Catholic colleges and the like. Are there stats proving that there’s less violence in those schools compared to say State Schools? One diff is of course that private schools can have an admissions policy, which is only possible because public schools are obliged to accept at least anyone in their catchment area. Are religious environments less violent than others? I doubt it.

On a larger scale, most wars have religious “cause”, so there religion is actually triggering violence. There has been research on whether secular societies have a higher crime rate, and the answer is no (in fact the opposite, in some cases). Thus, any claim that non-religious people or societies would somehow lack morals to do what is right is utter nonsense. Morals have nothing to do with religion and everything with general practicalities in any society – the fact that religions also happen to have opinions on morals is of no consequence to that. This assertion can be proven by the fact that some societies -including religious ones- do engage (as a group) in various questionable behaviours which are regarded as ok within the group.

Social Psychology has a concept called “Social Proof”, if you see multiple others do something, it must be the right thing. We tend to look around us for “guidance” when we don’t know what to do in a specific situation. This system usually works well, but it can go wrong as well as be abused. Digressing a bit there… in any case I don’t think the sticker is making any point.