He was right. Dozens of pedestrians hurried by as he destroyed his bike lock with hacksaws and power tools on various busy sidewalks, seeming to confirm a stereotype about New Yorkers: “People are so busy that we keep our heads down and go to work,” he says. “People are so caught up in their own (life) that they’re not concerned with yours.”
Are New Yorkers — and city folk in general — really so busy and self-absorbed that we have no concern for others? Do we lack a moral compass? Is Rick Santorum right? For more than 50 years, “urban psychologists” have been faking seizures, dropping cash and breaking into cars in broad daylight to see if strangers would intervene. They’ve discovered two things. One is that people in rural areas do indeed get involved more readily than urbanites. But they’ve also concluded that this has very little to do with morality.
The linchpin of this theory is the Bystander Effect, which suggests that our failure to react is caused by the urban environment. It was first established in 1968 after the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese, the young Queens woman who was killed while dozens of witnesses looked on. But in the decades since, our knowledge of the Bystander Effect has evolved even further. Now we can even predict which people — in which cities — are most likely to help out a stranger.
Psychologist Dr. Harold Takooshian sees strong evidence of the Bystander Effect in Neistat’s bike-theft experiment. “When it comes to this fellow with the bike,” he says, “there are several reasons the people don’t intervene.”
by Will Doig, Salon | Read more:
Photo: R McKown via Shutterstock/Salon
