The Bystander Effect. Catherine Sanderson

so many years?

      Throughout my career—as a graduate student at Princeton University in the 1990s and as a professor at Amherst College over the last twenty years—my research has focused on the influence of social norms, the unwritten rules that shape our behavior. Although people follow these norms to fit in with their social group, they can also make crucial errors in their perception of these norms. The more I thought about these seemingly disparate examples of people failing to act, the more I began to see the root causes as driven by the same factors: confusion about what was happening, a lack of a sense of personal responsibility, misperception of social norms, and fear of consequences.

      I have discovered through my own work that educating people about the power of social norms, pointing out the errors we so often make in perceiving these norms and the consequences of our misperceptions, helps them engage in better behavior. I’ve done studies that show that freshman women who learn how campus social norms contribute to unhealthy body image ideals show lower rates of disordered eating later on, and that college students who learn that many of their peers struggle with mental health challenges have a more positive view of mental health services. Helping people understand the psychological processes that lead them to misperceive what those around them are actually thinking—to believe that all women want to be thin, that other college students never feel sad or lonely—reduces the mistakes and misunderstandings we make about other people and can improve our psychological and physical well-being. It can also push us to act.

      In my very first introduction to psychology as an undergraduate at Stanford in 1987, I remember being fascinated when I learned how much being in a group influenced our own behavior. I was fortunate enough to have Phil Zimbardo—whose Stanford Prison Experiment remains one of the most famous and controversial studies in psychology—as my professor. It was quite an introduction to the field of social psychology!

      Back then, researchers could design experiments and measure people’s behavior, but we couldn’t penetrate the mechanisms that explained them. We couldn’t see what was happening in the brain. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have completely changed that. It is now possible to see in real time how certain scenarios, pressures, and experiences play out in the brain. As I’ll describe throughout this book, these results have revealed that many of the processes that drive inaction occur not through a careful deliberative process, but at an automatic level in the brain.

      My goal in writing this book is to help people understand the psychological factors that underlie the very natural human tendency to stay silent in the face of bad behavior, and to show how significant a role that silence plays in allowing the bad behavior to continue. In the first half of the book, I describe how situational and psychological factors can lead good people to engage in bad behavior (Chapter 1), or, more commonly, to stay silent in the face of bad behavior by others (Chapters 2 to 5). Next, I show how these factors play out to inhibit action in distinct real-world situations, including bullying in school (Chapter 6), sexual misconduct in college (Chapter 7), and unethical behavior in the workplace (Chapter 8). I end by examining how some people are more able to stand up to others and what we can learn from these moral rebels (Chapter 9). In the closing chapter I look at strategies we all can use—regardless of our personality—to increase the likelihood that we will speak up and take action when we are most needed.

      My hope is that providing insight into the forces that keep us from acting—and offering practical strategies for resisting such pressure in our own lives—will allow readers of this book to step up and do the right thing, even when it feels really hard. Ultimately, that’s the secret to breaking the silence of the bystander—and making sure no one has to wait twenty hours after a serious injury before someone picks up the phone.

Part I