Calling 911

Yesterday, I was researching the bystander effect for a speech I'm doing in my Communications class. I watched this video, where an experiment was performed using a man lying down "passed out" in a busy place. The bystander effect is a psychological phenomenon where the more people are present in an emergency, the less likely any one person is to help. So in the experiment, no one helped the man lying on the ground because they all figured someone else would do it.

This morning at work, I saw a man passed out in front of a nightclub. There was a car stopped in the street in front of him and several people on the sidewalk around him. I stayed in my car because, hey, it was 4 am and I'm a female and I was alone, but I rolled down my window and asked if anybody knew the man. They all shrugged and went on their way. Normally I wouldn't have even bothered to ask. I would probably have just assumed that one of the people on the sidewalk knew him, but after watching the videos of the psychological experiments on YouTube and reading about cases where people have died because no one bothered to help, I knew I couldn't just drive away.

So, for the fifth time in under a year, I called 911. It's amazing to me how commonplace it's become for me to state the nature and address of my emergency. And I guess it's true what I read about how just knowing that the bystander effect exists lessens its effect on people.