So I phoned the police and stayed with her for the next 20 minutes, until the police showed up. I was getting soaked in the rain and making myself late, but felt I owed it to her to stay put and make sure she came through it all OK. As I remounted my bike and rode away, it occurred to me that she didn't at any point thank me, and since then has made no attempt to contact me even though we discussed where I work (just across the road from her) as part of the small-talk. So in her own way, she was doing the same thing as the other drivers who had so upset her, albeit inadvertently. I probably wouldn't have stopped either, except she was literally blocking my path.

So it's easy to marvel at how disassociated we all are. A different thing entirely to do anything meaningful about it, even on a purely personal level. There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers, even less when there's a risk of being dragged into someone else's potentially violent confrontation. This is not a problem with phones, it's a problem with excessively large communities where we will probably never run into each other again. So why take the risk?

I currently live in Taiwan and just yesterday there was a subway stabbing - a 20s male started stabbing people on the subway. Naturally, reactions was slow as most people was playing their phones or getting some shut eye. He managed to kill 4 people, get off the subway and intimidate more people, before finally brought down by a 62 elder man.

Everyone can be armchair quarterbacks, shake their heads in disappointment, raise their fits in anger, but when you are in a situation such as the above, or witness a knife attack - you are stunned. Taipei is one of the safest city in Asia. Most of us don't see scenes such as this except on TV, and most of us don't know how to react. It's fight/intervene or flight/stay out of it.

I've taken defence classes, including Krav Maga and they all emphasize that knives are the most deadly weapon in the world due to its ease of access and the damage it can do.

Sorry it happened to the OP but I don't think society has 'become' anything. There's no proof that people are more willing to jump between a knife wielding maniac and a victim before the iPhone age.

edit: OK, I'm being downvoted. That's fine. But, why put your irreplaceable life in mortal danger for the sake of keeping hold of replaceable consumer electronics? That's the disconnect I'm finding hard to process.

-- Minimum: you'll miss the day of work, have an arrest on your record which you'll have to disclose forever and which may cost you your career, may make it impossible to enter foreign countries, and so on.

-- Probable: you'll miss many days of work due to police/legal complications. Significant chance of losing your job. Significant chance of grievous personal injury. Significant chance of assault charges which will cost you (minimum) tens of thousands of dollars to defend against (more likely >$100,000).

-- Possible: Killed by knife. Killed by cop. Jailed for assault. Jailed for murder (if attacker ends up dead, you're going to be charged for sure). Newspaper columnist heaps scorn on your actions.

-- Benefits, maximum: a newspaper mentions your name in a good way. Victim says "thank you".

Yes, everyone is wondering if someone else will intervene. But also, individually, the calculus for intervening is just terrible. Highly likely consequences include months in the hospital, months in jail, cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The joke about a knife fight is that the winner is in the hospital, the loser in the morgue. Which one of those two will you be?

I could have just called the police, but that doesn't really help in an immediate situation of one person trying to stab someone. So this situation calls for either: 1) Subduing the attacker by pinning them. 2) Doing enough damage to the attacker that they can't move. If they are on top of the victim, they maybe are in a good position for me to run up and corner-kick their head and end things with a quick concussion. I can't tell from the prose. Otherwise, it would be better to just restrain her and pin her to the ground.

So I'm either a man pinning screaming woman to the ground in a public place or a man who is viscously beating a woman in public.

No thanks, "Real Men" don't hit girls. http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/brand-what-do-you...

Especially not in public where "defend the woman being attacked" is a fantasy for a whole bunch of people.

1) Your reality changes. At any point, in every street, someone/some gang can step up and change your situation to something vastly different than the reality the other people around you are in at that moment.

2) Nobody cares. People don't want to get involved. They are not aware of the situation, or even when they are, they are not in it themselves. As a woman you might have the luck of a knight in shiny armour nearby who feels obliged to step up and help, but as a fit male, all bets are off. Few want to get between "men fighting" – to them you are a perpetrator, not a victim.

The loneliness and absurdity of such situations are hard to get over. Years later I'm still more aware of my environment whenever I'm out, and I always check for exits and whom not to turn my back to. It has also made me more likely to reach out and help others in such situations, partly because I can relate, and partly because I'm more aware that something doesn't feel quite right.

You must learn to accept that if you have belongings, you might lose them. Or alternatively, be willing to pointlessly fight like hell with a random stranger for little or no benefit. The second option might cost a hell of a lot more overall, even when you "win".

It's partly bystander effect ("I'll leave it to someone else to intervene") and partly a very real fear of the intervention going wrong. Maybe you get stabbed. Maybe the police get involved and you end up with an assault conviction and consequent expulsion from the middle class. Maybe the scene isn't all it seems (setup for robbery, or domestic where both parties turn on the intervenor).

Commuting and the mass-population city kind of relies on us forming the habit of studiously ignoring one another, and it's a hard habit to shake in an emergency.

I was in a similar situation once and just gave up my phone and mug money. I was somewhat prepared because I was warned it would happen. Maybe this book saved my life http://www.roughguides.com/shop/rough-guide-new-york-city/ As I was pulled into a dark alley, a young woman walked by like it was completely normal to see someone mugged. Then I packed my things and left NY and never looked back.

wikipedia entry here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

long story short, what's going on in people's minds when they don't help is that, probably someone else will step in, and playing hero will probably just get in the way.

which, isn't that helpful if 100% of the bystanders are thinking that. It's somebody else's problem.

there's a simple remedy- Don't scream "help! anyone! help!" scream "Hey you, burly looking dude. Help! yes you!" ' This is what psychologists say. until the evidence comes in, I'm skeptical that it would work. but it's better than repeating these stories again and again.

This is the way things are in 2014.

For me to risk my life for you, I would have to know you somewhat well, and then I would very likely intervene.

It's not only the bystander effect, but also the quite rational question "do I want to risk my own life for the sake of this woman I don't know, in this situation I know very little about?"

Once, my friend intervened in two drunk girls fighting each other. He was calm, but instead they just turned against him.

It's simply a game of pros and cons, and I can very much follow the community thing that Anderkent mentions in another thread.

One is diffusion of responsibility or bystander effects, which I think she's hinting at. In a crowd an individual is less likely to take action. I think this has a lot to do with our social instincts. Being in a crowd of strangers is a new thing. We aren't built for it.

On our own, we make decisions for ourselves. That's easy. A group is supposed to be a family or troop or somesuch. These will usually have a leader. Someone responsible for deciding that this is a mugging, that we're on the victim's side and that we are going to join the fight. I'm not sure it has to be a literal leader, but there needs to be a pre-established decision making process and the individual needs to know where they stand in it.

A second issue is that this is not really a question of "willingness to help" in the intellectual sense. It's a question of instinct.

A third is that in a city (or in modern life in general) we are surrounded by other people's problems. The homeless person we step over, the domestic violence sounds we don't call the cops on, the volunteer help line where we don't volunteer at and the charity we don't contribute to.

This is complicated. I think it's more about living in cities, nations and the global village than it is about iphones.

Luckily, Google's cache has a copy already:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:m0OtEZT...

Another thing to consider is getting a gun or at least supporting gun rights. Not a lot of unarmed people are going to help you against a crazy person with a knife. If someone was caring a gun, they could have helped. If she were caring, then she could have put an end to this nightmare herself.

There's a saying in the gun rights community, "The second you need a cop, they're always minutes away." All the cops I know agree with that statement. It's not a reflection on them, just that they can't be everywhere all the time.

I hope her injuries (both physical and mental) heal quickly.

I think part of the explanation is that such situations occur pretty rarely in the developed world, so people do not know what's the appropriate reaction: Fight back and risk getting attacked as well, scream for help, just call the police? It probably can be compared to first-aid situations, where most people seem to get completely paralyzed and are unable to help the injured person. Maybe governments should offer seminars where people learn to react properly in such situations, just like in the first-aid seminars that you're required to attend when you get your driving license.

I've had this habit for about a year. So far, called the police too late to do anything about it twice (once because my phone was dead, once from a combination of negligence and not knowing the right number to call), and once called the emergency number for a guy who fainted in public (but ran off before help could arrive). In the last case, a handful of other bystanders also stopped to help the guy, so bystander effect mysteriously didn't work that day. So I haven't been terribly helpful to anyone, but I was surprised how often I saw problems once I was looking for it.

(I don't think I would have been terribly helpful in this situation, though - I don't know how to break up a fight without being hurt, and probably wouldn't have thought of some of the better ideas like trying to single out a strong-looking person in the crowd and get them to help.)

I've lived in different countries and have seen different reactions where people are used to feeling responsible for their peers because they know the government doesn't care, is not efficient, or otherwise limited.

Of course, some people will also be reluctant to get stabbed for a complete stranger.

This is an example of the real world. Its nothing new, nor likely to change. History is full of "bad things" happening to people, on a large and small scale, that happened because others did nothing to stop it.

My comment does not mean that people should not help others who are in need, but suggesting this is something new - possibly due to changes in technology - reinforces the (wrong) idea that people think the world is a safe place.

OP also didn't react as hindsight tells us the answer. Hand it over. Why did they value something crappy like money over their life, are they so superficial? (Probably not)

We've been told a million times just to hand it over, but OP still didn't.

Concentrate on the long term issues, there are more and they are solvable through logic, like solving homelessness.

Don't worry so much about how people react in unexpected situations. Worry more about peoples long term decision making, that scares me.

1) Believe that your intervention will do good/be effective.

2) Have a personal relationship with the victim.

3) Be thinking of the victim as a person rather than a piece of the scenery.

4) Perceive the risk to self (legal/physical) to be low.

5) Don't believe someone else will do it.

6) Don't believe that it's a setup where the 'victim' will turn on you.

I'm not saying those are the things that matter, they're just the things that came to mind.

And how many of them typically apply?

This was a knife attack, and that probably takes care of 1 and 4. I've seen untrained people fighting in the street, and it's the equivalent of a monkey slinging shit. Add to that that a knife is less to do with careful application of skill - it's more constant. It's entirely possible, if people had intervened, we'd be talking about multiple people seriously injured, perhaps scarred for life, or killed.

2 doesn't apply, 3 could go either way, 5 might be the case - there were a lot of people there. 6, happens, but again might go either way.

...

And there's a thought - did they see the knife? or did they just see two people having a domestic and screaming at each other? I imagine that might decrease the chances of anything happening.

Nowadays, people like me wouldn't know the first thing about hitting someone or defending themselves. My childhood home was in what we'd consider "a bad area" of a Southern European city (mafia and all that) but even there it took very little care to stay out of trouble. I don't think I've ever been in a physical confrontation with anyone after my 18th birthday; I wouldn't know how to use a knife or a gun, nor how to protect myself from it. Law enforcement and cultural pressure are now so efficient that they can usually limit violent activity to specific areas, so as long as I stay away from those, I'm very likely to be safe. (Every city has different attitudes and problems, of course, but that's more or less true for most of them)

If a random stranger started knifing people in my subway carriage, I'd probably freeze too - I'm a family man, not a goddamn soldier or street-fighter. Same for witnessing something like what OP describes.

Someone should have helped her, but with hindsight she didn't want to give up her own electronics and wanted someone else to risk their life for her things.

But this situation is also very traumatic for her so there could be any number of reasons why she chose not to just hand her phone over.

I definitely can understand her being angry, but this isn't really an issue about people not paying attention as much as it is bystander effect (it seems).

Also, although it may be beside the point, you could argue that giving them what they want will just increase muggings. The way to sort out the problem is to relax laws around people helping out victims in cases like this.

I downvoted you because, like the other top posts, your post managed to gather downvotes via emotional appeal, while posts that point out the actual social source of this behavior along with simple and effective advice on how to circumvent it, are left in the middle of this comment section due to lack of emotional appeal.

Yes, the second option did not work as planned, and it is the main point of the article.

And also, did the OP not consider the potential consequences of throwing a boiling drink in the face of another person armed with a knife?

When the police come to sort out an altercation in progress, everyone involved is going to get tackled, rolled face down, have a cop kneel on your neck with his entire body weight, have your arms wrenched behind your back, and placed in handcuffs. That is the best, least physical outcome possible.

Google: "victim sues rescuer" [1]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=attacker+sues+victim

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=victim+sues+rescuer

Exactly this. The same goes for calling emergency services - there are cases where response was delayed because everyone was assuming someone else was doing it. I've been the one person who did it before, I'd say due to having an understanding of this. It's really something people should be taught about in school and how to avoid both participating in it and letting it happen.

As an aside, apparently she pretty much did what you suggest (which is the standard advice to deal with the bystander effect) in that she asked one particular bystander to help her, but even that didn't work.

Is this hypothesis testable?

If you have a dog with an injured paw then different people will willingly help you (dog lovers) than those people that will willingly help you find a lost cat (cat lovers). Same with directions, some random tourist might not be as willing to help you with directions as a native, the tourist could probably get the maps out on their phone, but they will not feel as if that is the thing to do. However, if you were lost in their home town then they might walk you to where you needed to go.

As a cyclist I often help other cyclists with flat tyres etc. and you try stopping me from helping out. I spent a decade working in the cycle trade so, for me, fixing someone else's bike is merely an opportunity to keep my skills fresh. I cannot say that first aid is my thing, however, I am sure that someone else will keep the patient warm until the authorities arrive, so I auto-delegate myself to warning traffic and collecting debris from the road in such circumstances. Because I don't do cars, I am unlikely to offer to bump start someone's car or help them back in if they have locked their keys inside. However, others that have those skills will take up the opportunity to help.

When it comes to violent confrontational circumstances, there was a time when I would have a go, however, after getting my head kicked in by four muggers I no longer feel inclined to get involved. However, I do have friends that have been doormen and they will leap to the opportunity to do a little bit of enforcing - it is in their skill set.

Most people are willing and able to help out if they can and if they have confidence in their usefulness in a given situation. The problem is that when there is some rare and outrageous act of violence going on that there are very few people around who have 'enforcing' in their skill set. Hence the apparent 'bystander effect'.

No, that is not how it would work out in most (if not all) cases. Especially not in such a public place. And especially not if the gun was contained in something, e.g. her purse.

Even if that person were a great shot, in a (even moderately) close combat fight with a knife-wielder, she would most likely not be able to pull/unlock the gun before being stabbed, or miss and/or hit others or just be plain too scared/untrained to keep that much control.

Even if it worked, there would be the question of ethics and legality of wounding/killing another person to save her possessions. The legality may not be an issue in (many states in) the US, but even there not always a clear case and most likely will have some legal procedure.

If she were able to use the gun for intimidation and get the assailant to run away, that might work, but the attacker is obviously beyond quite some normal mental restrictions when threatening to kill her in a public place and might not easily be deterred.

Guns are the perfect tool for killing people when you know you want/plan to kill people. They are effective in wounding too, if you're able to hit where it doesn't kill. They are mostly useless in not getting wounded/killed by someone who wants to wound/kill you.