1.
Quite some time ago, I read a twitter thread (which, of course, I can’t find anymore). The thread is by a (self-identified) older woman. She was on a plane and a teenage girl was sitting behind her, flying alone. Next to the girl was an older man, who tried to talk to the girl in quite a creepy way ever since take-off. It was clear that the girl tried to end the conversation but was unable to. After a while, the older woman decided to intervene. She told off the man and called the flight attendant, who demanded the man to change seat. After the incident, a couple of other older women who sat around them thanked her (the twitter OP), saying that they had been keeping an ear open this whole time too, and were going to intervene also had she not. Collectively, they kept the girl company until she met with the airline transport person. The flight attendant (a woman) also thanked them for their help.
The twitter OP explained how, as a mother, it was comforting to know that there are others like her who would look out for her children when she couldn’t. But she also noticed something unsettling: none of the men sitting around them seemed to have the slightest idea of what had happened. It wasn’t that they sided with the creepy man; it was just that the idea that the situation was problematic and needed monitoring did not enter into their consciousness at all.
2.
A few months ago, I attended a party in a semi-professional setting (hence: some details are blurred). At some point in the night, most people were sitting around a table, chitchatting. I was tired and so was not part of the big conversation. At one point, I realized that a male acquaintance seemed to be hitting on a woman. The woman knew virtually no one in the room, and the man knew most people. I thought she looked uncomfortable. No one else seemed bothered, and it was happening in plain sight. I’m generally really bad at reading social cues, and I’m not friends with either of them, so I thought maybe I misread the situation. I texted two friends who were there, both of whom thought it was “weird”. “Should we do something?” I texted to ask.
We didn’t end up doing anything. One friend was convinced that the man was in a relationship then (which turned out to be false) and so couldn’t have been flirting. I left soon after. I didn’t think about this again until about a month ago when I told this story to a different friend who wasn’t there that day.
“Wtf, really? He did that? That’s awful!” The friend said, and proceeded to explain why it was uniquely terrible given the context. He was right, of course. My instinct was right — it was bad regardless of whether that acquaintance was in a relationship. It was noticeably bad, even by someone like me who’s usually oblivious of social undertones. And yet the fact that everyone saw it and no one seemed to think it was a problem made me suppress it for months, telling the story only as a weird anecdote.
I should have intervened. And I say this as someone who does not have a self-esteem issue and does not need to be comforted: I screwed up. I did the wrong thing. And I blame myself for having been a coward.
3.
We were in the car in the Home Depot parking lot, ready to depart, when a man shouted loudly and aggressively: “hey—-!!!” I turned to look: two (white) men in their 50s walked from behind us towards a parking space in front of us, where another (Hispanic) man dressed in Home Depot’s employee apron was standing.
I didn’t hear what happened next because the person who was driving decided to drive away.
“Do you think they know each other?” I asked.
“Probably not.” My driver said, “I think they are just very upset at something that employee did.”
“Shouldn’t we have stayed and, you know, call the police if necessary?” I asked.
There were two people in the car, and they are both very important to me. And until that moment, it had never occurred to me that it was possible for someone to see a situation as potentially problematic, and then just walk away like that.
To be specific, I understand perfectly why people might choose not to intervene in these kinds of situations: they may be uncertain that their assessment of the situation is accurate and really do not want to risk making fools of themselves, or they may be (rightly or wrongly) worried about their own safety. I understand all of these, and I tend to have greater sympathy than (I think) most when it comes to bystander self-preservation. What I don’t understand is for the concept of intervention to have never crossed the mind of someone who sees a problem and recognizes it as such. I don’t understand it so much so that my initial response was: surely the reason we were driving away was that they both thought it was a friendly exchange and I had just read it wrong.
4.
I tend to think of causal analyses of particular social incidents scientifically comparable to creative storytelling, but I cannot stop thinking about it. There is a convenient (and unfalsifiable) story along the lines of: I am, demographically, the kind of person who is more likely to find herself in a situation that would require bystander intervention than any of my friends, and therefore I feel strongly about helping those who could have easily been me.
But I don’t actually like this story. Phenomenologically, I don’t ever think about myself in the situation of the victim before I decide to intervene. As a matter of fact, it usually is pretty difficult for me to empathize with the victim adequately when the need does arise. Moreover, I dislike the narrative of “but what if it’s your daughter or sister?” It is too close to the classical economics “a rational agent is a selfish one where all prosocial behaviours can be explained through utility maximization in repeated games” line that I do not like. Whether or not it’s evolutionarily true, it certainly is very different from how people reason to themselves when they decide to make the world a better place.
In any case, I have always thought that the reason why some people do not do things is that they 1) do not recognize them as problematic & in need of intervention, or 2) do not see how much benefit and how little cost there is. It has never occurred to me that some people — ones with more social capital than me — would see something as problematic and not think about intervening. And that these people are good people. And that they do it out of habit.
It’s been really hard for me to describe, to myself even, how I feel. Unsettled, surely. But also scared.
5.
I met Kenny when I was an undergraduate student in Vancouver. I was living alone and driving to school. My car had been behaving weird for some time but I was too busy with school to have it checked out. I also had never taken a car to a mechanic before and so didn’t actually know how it worked.
I was driving home one evening and another car drove next to me. The driver — Kenny — rolled down his window and shouted things at me. Initially, I was worried that it was some sort of prank or catcalling and so I ignored it, but he persisted. Eventually, I rolled down my window, and he shouted “your tire!” I pulled over. He pulled over after me. He got off the car and explained that my tire was completely flat and it was incredibly dangerous for me to drive the car like that.
I ended up calling roadside assistance. Kenny waited with me and drove me home. We remained acquaintance for some time and have lost contact since I graduated. I once drove him to and from a mechanic that was an hour and a half away so he could get his car checked out by someone good. In my mind, that was my way of repaying him. We never did become friends, but I remain thankful for that little thing that he decided to do.
This morning, I was driving with a friend to school. A truck with a trunk full of gardening equipment turned onto the street in front of us.
“Did he just drop a watering hose?” My friend said.
“I didn’t see. Did he?” I asked. We were both stopped at the light waiting to turn left. I realized the tailgate of the truck was open.
“I’m pretty sure.” My friend said.
I pulled forward next to the truck, opened my window and shouted, “your stuff is falling off!”
The driver seemed to have fully expected this to happen. Without a word, he jumped out of his truck and fixed his tailgate. “You dropped something when you turned!” I shouted again, pointing back. He ran along the road (it was an empty residential street) to fetch it. The traffic light turned green, and so I went on my way.
I’d like to think that he will one day do something similar for someone else.
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I wonder if the unwillingness to accept any form of inconvenience and/or risk could account for the reason that people, who are socially adept enough to recognize a situation and socially resourceful enough to take actions, decide not to engage. In other words, I imagine those people say, “why would I?” And except for a banter-like “why wouldn’t you,” I am usually clueless in providing a counterargument. Nonetheless, the example of your encounter with Kevin and your ensuing actions inspired, as I imagined, by Kevin’s actions, gave me hope and reminded me how I chose to step up after witnessing some heart-warming, humanity-affirming actions myself.
I agree with you in that, I think, there is a sense in which argumentation has only so much role to play in convincing someone to do something. My responses to the “why would I?” tend to be based on the assumption that the person *would* be willing to do something altruistic if the circumstances are right (and so my responses tend to focus on arguing that the circumstances are indeed right). I don’t think rational argumentation is capable of convincing someone that they should be altruistic.
That said, I also believe (perhaps falsely) that most people *are* open to altruistic actions, at least in principle, and so if they appear as nonreceptive that’s usually because there is some hidden cost they are (perhaps unconsciously) worried about that hasn’t been properly addressed yet. It’s just hard for me to try to “understand” their perspective because I do feel strongly that, whatever perspectives they may have, they’re just wrong.
You’re speaking here to a really interesting interplay among (or perhaps continuum along?) attention/habit, instincts of self-preservation/self-interest, and questions of ethics/responsibility/effort. One additional theme that occurred to me while reading your piece,, and might be indirectly related to these others, is boundaries (i.e. whether you might be overstepping their bounds in intervening and uncertainty about your competence to make this judgment call). This seems to have been the main factor in 2) that made it hard to act, more than cowardice; I would call it self-censoring and difficulty being decisive under conditions of uncertainty, which can of course have ethical implications but strikes me as different. Not trying to comfort you as requested (though I’d be happy if it did!).
Sorry it took me so long to approve! I set up email notification and so stopped regularly check the backend, and then turned out the email got filtered into spam..
Oh no worries! Thanks so much for responding. It didn’t even occur to me to check back here until now since it sounded like the site would just send an automatic notification if anything was approved or you replied, so in the absence of that I figured you were just doing other things. These little snafus are always useful to work through for future reference. Great blog, by the way.