The Bystander Effect

At work, each floor has a kitchen area, with two beverage fridges, containing sodas, milk, and a variety of juices. Beverages are stocked weekly, and often checked for expiry or spoil. Last week, one of the fridges broke down, and to protect the milk from spoiling, someone moved it to the neighboring fridge. The next day I passed by the kitchen, the fridge was still broken, and more beverages started migrating to the working fridge. A week passed, and nothing changed. I realized that we are witnessing the bystander effect in action.

The bystander effect or bystander apathy is a phenomenon where people are less likely to act when others are present, because they assume that in a group someone eventually will. The apathy increases with the number of people in a group. The internet has a lot of examples of the bystander effect, and advice on how to circumvent it when you need to ask for help. Most of the examples involve dire and emergency situations, which highlight the incongruity of the help offered by the group. Interestingly however, we also experience the bystander apathy in milder non-emergency situations, for example when something is obviously broken, and we implicitly assume that someone else in the group will step up and fix it.

The solution to the fridge problem was very easy. I submitted a facilities request, and within an hour the fridge was fixed, and the beverages happily migrated to their respective locations. Perhaps the bystander apathy has its merit; someone eventually will act.